President John Dramani Mahama has called on his colleague African leaders to rise to the occasion and redesign the continent’s health architecture.
Addressing the opening session of the Africa Health Sovereignty Summit in Accra yesterday, President Mahama said the platform must be the springboard for sustainable health financing on the continent.
“In this moment, we are called to redesign the architecture that has, for too long, excluded Africa’s voices, needs, and innovations. We are called to build systems that do more than respond to crises–we must build systems that generate resilience, produce equity, and amplify dignity,” the President said.
The summit seeks to launch the Accra Compact and galvanise a coalition of African leaders and global partners committed to a new health and development paradigm anchored on mutual accountability, shared investment, and systemic reform.
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Its objectives include repositioning health financing as a sovereign, economic, and investment agenda, moving beyond aid dependency, promote Ghana’s Sustain Initiative as a scalable model for sustainable health systems, strengthening and facilitating political dialogue among African Heads of State on strategies to transition from external funding and increase domestic and private sector financing amongst others.
According to President Mahama, the summit comes at a time of overlapping and intensifying global crises – war, pandemics, climate shocks, economic volatility, and widening inequalities – which have exposed the health fault lines.
He said though the continent had a history of overcoming health crisis as a result of bold partnerships, when global development assistance declined in 2023, Africa felt the shock immediately as maternal health programmes were halted, vaccine supplies delayed, and medicines disappeared from clinic shelves.
“This is not merely a funding gap. It is a crisis of imagination, a vacuum of solidarity, and a deep failure of shared responsibility. Above all, it is a question of sovereignty–the right of African nations to determine their health priorities, marshal their capacities, and lead with their own vision. Africa must no longer be the patient. It must be the author, the architect, and the advocate of its health destiny,” President Mahama stated.
Updating the summit on what Ghana has done in that regard, President Mahama said his administration has uncapped the National Health Insurance Scheme financing to make available extra GH¢3.5 billion for broader and deeper health coverage, rolled out the Ghana Medical Trust Fund to mobilise funds to tackle chronic diseases and a primary health care programme in the offing.
To President Mahama, the outdated notion that health drains economies must be rejected as the World Health Organisation has established that every $1 invested in health resilience yields up to $4 returns; a return even greater in Africa, where youthful populations represent latent economic dynamism.
He urged that ministers of finance across the continent to treat health as a capital investment, encouraged sovereign wealth funds to allocate resources to biotech, diagnostics, and resilient infrastructure and called on economies to revise national accounts to reflect health as a productivity multiplier–not a consumption expense.
President Mahama proposed that globally, the world championed a new health governance architecture, regionally, Africa scaled its home-grown solutions and nationally, countries mustered the political will to execute the health agenda.
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On his part the Director-General of the World Health Organisation, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesu commended President Mahama for the initiative as Health aid is expected to reduce by 40 per cent this year.
In that seeming crisis, he said, lies opportunities for Africa to free itself from aid dependency and rally towards sovereignty.
Dr Ghebreyesu underscored the need for countries to prioritise health financing because “the most sustainable way to fund health is the national budget. More money is not enough, what matters is how that money is used”.
A former President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, Olusegun Obasanjo, also entreated the continent to mainstream herbal medical care in its health care delivery.