COMMENT: Universal health in Africa

Countries across Africa are already taking steps to advance UHC. For example, Ghana has instituted a National Health Insurance Scheme that covers treatment for most diseases, as well as a system that trains nurses to provide door-to-door primary-care services for hard-to-reach populations. And in Ethiopia, a cadre of 38,000 health-extension workers helps to ensure that essential health services reach people wherever they are. Such programs prove that UHC is achievable in Africa.

Yet much more work needs to be done to ensure that all people in all countries across Africa – and, indeed, across the developing world – have access to the health care they need. When health leaders from across Africa recently gathered in Windhoek, Namibia, to discuss precisely these topics, it was an ideal moment to commit to carrying out that work.

Indeed, the Windhoek meeting – which coincides with the third UHC Day on 12 December – offers an unprecedented opportunity for countries to define the critical measures needed, and make concrete commitments to strengthen integrated, people-centered services rooted in primary health care. We need to focus on training health workers effectively, improving access to medicines, and establishing innovative mechanisms for health financing at the individual and household levels.

The cost of weak health systems – both to human lives and to the economy – is steep. The Ebola outbreak – which economists estimate cost three times more to bring under control than it would have cost to build functioning health-care systems in the first place – made that starkly clear. But so do the lives lost every day to preventable and treatable diseases.

Achieving UHC is not just a moral imperative; it’s also an economic one. The time has come to fulfill it.

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Matshidiso Moeti is Regional Director for Africa at the World Health Organization.

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Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2016.
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