HSRI Two-Year Anniversary Celebration: Leveraging the Private Sector to Reach Health Security Goals in Africa
A High-Level Event on the sidelines of the Africa Leaders Summit
December 13, 2022 | 9:00 am – 12:30 pm | Washington DC
Building on the lessons learned from COVID-19, African leaders have launched a number of important initiatives to strengthen the continent’s health security, including setting the target that Africa will produce 60% of the vaccines and medicines that it consumes by 2040. From setting up the African Medicines Supply Platform (AMSP), the African Medicines Agency and the African Vaccine Acquisition Task Team (AVATT) to its follow-on Partnership for African Vaccine Manufacturing (PAVM), the African Union and its member states have set up programs designed to work closely with the private sector to improve upon current procurement systems and increase investment. At the same time, a number of African countries are also piloting ways to better use Information Communication Technology (ICT) to re-imagine healthcare delivery and planning and improve supply chains, including making health care systems more patient-centric and making procurement systems more agile. Together, these efforts are reforming systems from the top and the bottom.
Launched in 2020 at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, CCA’s 2-year U.S.-Africa Health Security and Resilience Initiative (HSRI) brought together U.S. and African government and private sector leaders to focus not only on COVID-19 and other disease management on the continent, but on Universal Health Coverage (UHC) as well as trade and investment in health goods and services as critical areas for collaboration to enhance African health systems security and resilience.
HSRI phase I has witnessed how African governments are working to enhance health security and resilience on the continent, and recognizes consistent themes that have emerged, including the need to improve the ability of health facilities to meet patient needs, improving access to quality care and ensuring the availability of medicines and medical products for those who need them. Equally clear is the urgency African governments feel to implement programs (like PAVM) to achieve these goals, and a sense that they can be accelerated through strategic, effective private sector engagement, even if governments do not always have clear and consistent ways of engaging companies, which continues to drive innovation and investments. As the first phase of HSRI comes to a successful close, CCA and its health sector members will take advantage of the presence of African HOS, leaders of African health institutions (like WHO, AMA, AMSP, and AVATT) as well as CEOs of U.S. and African health sector companies to celebrate Phase I of HSRI and launch Phase II of the initiative at a high-level dialogue on strengthening African health systems.
Speakers will share experiences and lessons in addressing key issues that enable expanded access to quality healthcare in Africa, including sharing examples of how innovations from the private sector have helped governments achieve goals, reinforcing the importance of incorporating the private sector into the process of strengthening African health systems. This session will explore how to expand new ways of doing business between governments and the private sector, including more fully incorporating the private sector into planning and execution across supply chains to deliver better health outcomes and more efficiently use public resources.
