It is the 7th anniversary of the pledge by African Union member states to allocate 15% of national budgets to health. In a statement to mark the anniversary, Archbishop Tutu stated:
The dramatic surge in food prices has plunged millions of poor people and many net food importing poor countries into a food crisis. Consequently, it has also put at risk their chances of achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015. Whilst the focus has been on the impact on the MDG1 of reducing poverty and hunger, given the close inter-connectedness between all the 8 MDGs, the impact on these sections of the poor on health, education and livelihoods more broadly, cannot be underestimated.
The Partnership for Maternal, Newborn & Child Health has called on G8 leaders to fulfil their previous commitments to global health and commit to new, long-term financing for essential interventions that could avert the deaths of over 6 million mothers, newborns and children every year.
CAPE TOWN – Leading global health experts, policy-makers and parliamentarians convened in Cape Town last week to address the urgent need for accelerated progress to reduce maternal, newborn and child deaths, if internationally-agreed targets are to be met.
Representatives drawn from more than thirty countries debated various instruments for attaining good coordination in Africa and proceeded to nominate regional representatives who will serve on Africa’s governing council, a new organ that replaces the old facilitation team. Some of the recommendations made directly touched on what should be done in order for this structure to effectively work with a secretariat that they identified as severely limited in its human-power base at the moment.
