The nearly 200,000 African citizens that participated in ONE’s You Choose campaign early this year told the UN and world leaders that investing in health, especially in rural areas, is amongst the most urgent development priorities in Africa today.
This is because preventable and treatable diseases such as AIDS, TB, and malaria together still kill more than 2 million people in Africa annually. Childhood illnesses like pneumonia and diarrhoea kill thousands more every single day. Yet, as we all know, this is not inevitable and it certainly isn’t acceptable.
The purpose of ONE’s new campaign, Open budgets, Save Lives, is for us as African citizens to collectively urge our leaders increase their health budget in accordance with the Abuja Africa Union health declaration (2001) and also ensure that health budgeting and spending is transparent. Citizens must be able to hold their governments accountable for how public funds are reaching patients.
Over the last few decades we have learnt a lot about what it takes to solve big global health challenges. Technical experts and policy wonks alike will tell you that improving health requires a combination of smart planning, effective delivery, public-private partnership, and local innovation. But most crucially it requires resources, across the board.
Historically, most of ONE’s attention has been on donor capital mainly when it comes to enhancing global health efforts. But with a rapidly growing ONE grassroots membership in Africa, our focus increasingly is on ensuring African governments meet their existing commitments to invest more in the health of their own people. Thus, it is both exciting and empowering that our Africa health campaigning will focus on this growing membership, its leadership, its commitments, its own dynamic advocacy movements, and its own resources.
Over a decade ago in 2001, African leaders signed the Abuja declaration committing to spend 15% of their national budgets on health programmes. This was informed by the realisation that Africa’s race to prosperity was held back by its high disease burden. The collective wisdom was that significant increases in African public health spending, bolstered by donor support and other investors, could help turn the tide on some of these deadly diseases and unleash the productive potential of the affected and vulnerable population.
Since then, however, our governments have fallen far short of achieving their own 15% target. According to the World Health Organisation, only six countries met the Abuja target in 2011, with another three very close.
This matters in the big scheme of things. Recent ONE Data Report analysis shows that collectively, an estimated US $102 billion in additional resources could have been freed up for health programs if African governments had met their commitments every year between 2001 and 2010. But even if only half of $102 billion had been made available significant numbers of lives would have been saved. US$ 51 billion would have been more than the roughly $46 billion that all donors spent on health in Africa during the same time period. This large deficit is not unconnected to the death of 2 million people in Africa every year from preventable and treatable diseases.
Compounding the problem is the fact that many of our countries’ budgets are not “open”, making it hard to publicly track how much is being spent and how a country prioritises spending among diseases, between regional and local facilities, and how it’s managing and monitoring its investments. Ultimately, it is harder to track the effectiveness of resources at ensuring citizens can access the health services they need.
Unmet health financing commitments and opaque budgets drum rolls us to our newest campaign: Open budgets. Save lives. While we give credit to African governments for a lot of the progress in health achievements over the last decade, and are mindful of the unenviable task facing African Ministers of Health and Finance of prioritising an incredible number of competing challenges, we believe health comes first.
We need your help in holding governments accountable for increasing their spending in an open and transparent way.
If you are in South Africa: SMS your name to 30670 for FREE & ask the Government to increase and open our health budgets
If you are anywhere else, take action right now on ONE.org
Together, we can help ensure that African resources for African health challenges play a greater role in ending the tragedy of preventable diseases like AIDS, TB, and malaria once and for all.