In 2018, the governments of Ghana, Germany and Norway requested the World Health Organization (WHO) to take the lead in an initiative to improve the coordination of international cooperation in the health sector. As a result, 12 multilateral organizations involved in the health sector are preparing a plan to accelerate, align, account and assess their efforts in the health sector for realizing the Sustainable Development Goal for health: SDG3. We applaud this initiative; here is our input for an online civil society consultation.
This plan, the Global Action Plan for Healthy Lives and Well-being (GAP in short), will be presented in September 2019 during the High-Level Meeting on Universal Health Coverage. Although preparations started already in 2018, and the plan is due in September, there has been no broad civil society consultation on its contents until now. From June 17-30, an on-line public consultation is held for inputs on the plan and its components.
Wemos welcomes this initiative. Fragmentation in international health cooperation has been placing a huge burden on low-income countries for many years. In all of the areas on which Wemos works – Finance for Health, Human Resources for Health and Access to Medicines – many gains can be made by improved coordination and alignment of efforts. Therefore we strongly regret that human resources for health is not receiving the attention it should in order to address the enormous shortages of health workers.
Wemos has been flagging this issue to the people involved in coordinating the GAP process since early this year, and has repeated this position in our input to the public consultation. In addition to paying due attention to the health workforce, we are suggesting to make the process of preparing the GAP more inclusive and to ensure that Financing for Health results in more resources raised and spent in an equitable manner.
Read our input (including endorsements) for the online consultation
