The World Health Organization on Tuesday July 18 handed over to the São Toméan Government the new strategy, valued at €9 million, to improve quality and access to health services and strengthen human resources capacities in the archipelago by 2027.
“Our ambition is to promote high quality and affordable health care and services for all, leaving no one behind, protecting the most vulnerable and promoting the well-being of the population of São Tomé and Príncipe, an essential human capital for economic and social development,” said WHO’s interim representative in the country, Françoise Bigirimana.
The WHO representative said that in implementing the new strategy, the organization will provide technical support and develop standards and policies to ensure the quality of healthcare and services, creating more partnerships for health and measuring trends and progress in the São Toméan health system.
The new strategy, valued at $10.125 million, contains five priorities for the next five years, including reorienting the approach to health at district level to achieve universal health coverage, the public health emergency, strengthening international health regulation and health promotion in all policies to “improve the well-being of the population through multisectoral coordination”.
It also envisages sustainable health financing, with the institutionalization of national health accounts and resource mobilization, as well as improving the workforce in the sector by ensuring the availability, distribution and quality of human resources through capacity building in management, leadership and technical expertise.
“Once these strategies are accomplished together and with technical support from WHO, the Ministry of Health, Labor and Social Affairs, and more specifically São Tomé and Príncipe, will be much better off in the future than it is today. The road is long, but it is made by walking and the first step begins today with the implementation of this document and its respective materialization”, underlined the São Toméan Minister of Health, Celsio Junqueira.
The United Nations coordinator in São Tomé and Príncipe, Eric Overvest, said that the WHO strategy is aligned with the new United Nations cooperation framework with São Tomé and Príncipe for 2023 to 2027, which aims to accelerate progress towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals in 2030.