By Abujah Racheal
The World Health Organisation (WHO) has urged African leaders to create legal frameworks that would be periodically reviewed and monitored to achieve a new Public Health Order.
Dr. Chikwe Ihekweazu, Assistant Director General, WHO, said this, while speaking on the topic, “The Case for a New Public Health Order” at the ongoing first virtual International Conference on Public Health in Africa (CPHIA 2021) on Wednesday.
The African Union (AU) and the Africa Centre for Disease Control (Africa CDC) organised CPHIA 2021, with over 10,000 participants from 140 countries around the world.
According to Iheakweazu, in creating a New Public Health Order, the continent will require new institutions.
“But they must also do the hard, sometimes boring, work of establishing the legal instruments and documents required to do the more interesting work.
“We need to build laboratory systems in order for a new public health order to be established. This will help sequencing capacity.
“We need our own technical capacity to fix equipment. We need to digitalise disease surveillance,” he advised.
He outlined the challenges the continent faced in the quest to achieve a new Public Health Order as political will, retaining people; to attract, pay and keep talented staff as well as making tough decisions on vertical programmes.
He said when change was happening, sometimes it was not obvious. “I see many people across the continent working to fight COVID-19 who are not celebrated, and yet they keep going.
“We need to not give up on this journey.”
Dr Natalie Mayet, Deputy Director, National Institute for Communicable Diseases, said the continent needed more investment in Public Health workforce, focusing on governance policy.
“Investing in financing for health workforce development will improve many aspects of health. Focus on getting more health for our money,” Mayet said.
According to her, to replace lost capacity due to COVID19, there was need to think about how to develop the next health workforce to meet future needs.
She stressed on education, noting that there was already a deficit of healthcare workers, and that the continent needed a systems approach.
Meanwhile, Dr Amadou Alpha Sall, General Administrator of Institute Pasteur of Dakar, discussed the collaborative initiative to advance diagnostics and the Senegalese COVID-19 Test.
Sall noted that the continent needed quality assurance, and that many diseases in low to middle income countries largely impacted their Gross domestic product (GDP).
He said Senegal built a business model, which made it very cheap.
“When Africa wants, it can. The goal is to make 50 million tests a year, not just for Senegal, but for Africa. Our destiny is in our own hands,” he added.
CPHIA 2021 featured seven scientific plenaries, eight parallel sessions, and more than 40 side events that focussed on the main pillars of the African Union’s New Public Health Order.
