By Kudakwashe Pembere
Amidst the dwindling donor and partner funding for the healthcare sector in the SADC region, Health ministers have resolved to mobilise domestic funding as well as a pooled procurement mechanism.
This was said by Health and Child Care Minister Dr Douglas Mombeshora who is the Chairperson of the SADC Ministerial Committee On Health speaking with journalists at the Annual Meeting Of SADC Ministers Of Health Responsible For HIV And AIDS.
So I can just outline some of the issues that we talked about. Funding for health, for example, where in short it has been realized that donors and partners are slowly reducing their funding to various programs including HIV, malaria and TB. As a result, the decision was taken that we must increase domestic funding to make sure that these programs are sustainable,” he said.
“Progress that has been made should be maintained because if we don’t increase domestic funding, we may reverse the gains that have been made. We also looked at the issue of health workforce, where we would want to make sure that we retain our workforce. All governments must take action to make sure that we have adequate resources to make health accessible.”
He said the pooled procurement plan should be drafted by January next year.
“We also looked at pooled procurement. This is where we are looking at the advantages of scales and where a procurement plan for the region must be presented in the next three months, must be completed by end of January, so that in February we will have an extraordinary meeting of the ministers again, but this will be done virtually to review the plan and so that we can implement it.
“There are advantages of pooled procurement. When you buy in bulk, the prices can be down and then all countries will benefit from that,” said Zimbabwe’s Health Minister.
The Health Minister added that they proposed to expand malaria elimination programs beyond the eight countries to all SADC countries.
“We also looked at issues of capacitating the programs that are already existing. That is when we look at malaria, where there was an E8 which was elimination of malaria in eight selected countries, but now we said we should move to say elimination must be done in all the 16 countries, there’s no reason why we should leave other countries.
“Again, because of the borders and movement across, you can’t use a line to demarcate and say we’ll eliminate malaria up to this line. What happens when you cross into the other border?
“Then it means we have to include all countries because we share borders which mosquitoes don’t know and that has been adopted as a decision,” Minister Mombeshora said.
He said health systems strengthening was crucial as well as the issue of manufacturing of vaccines within the region to save the much needed foreign currency.
