Remarks by WHO Regional Director for Africa, Dr Matshidiso Moeti
Mister President; Honourable Ministers; distinguished delegates; partners and colleagues, ladies and gentlemen.
Let me begin by sincerely thanking His Excellency President Faure Essozimna Gnassingbé of Togo for presiding over the opening ceremony and for having received us to exchange with us his vision and what he’s achieving to develop the country. I thank you, Professor Moustafa Mijiyawa, our dear colleague and brother Minister of Health of Togo, for so ably chairing this Seventy-second session of our Regional Committee for Africa; and I’d like, through you, to also thank sincerely the National Committee that helped organize our meeting, it enabled us to work very long hours, very hard indeed. So thank you for that.
We noted a very exceptional and unique engagement of Togo’s ministers from other sectors in our discussions and for that I’d like to also thank the government for having been interested more broadly in the work that we are doing and indeed as it has been noted it’s been an example of multisectoral action in practice and will inspire us going into the future.
I had the privilege to have an audience with His Excellency, the President, and he assured me that he’s working very hard to have a diverse leadership team with him and indeed we saw that in the room—diverse in terms of gender and age. That’s an inspiration to mein the last two years of what to do with our staff in the region as well.
It has been an absolute pleasure to be able to meet in-person in Lomé, after such a long period of isolation and separation due to the COVID-19 pandemic. I won’t forget the exceptional spirit amongst the crowds of Walk the Talk participants, and the beautiful music and entertainment that very much informed our opening ceremony.
I’d like to thank the ministers and delegates that joined us virtually, which is an experience that we’ve learned during the pandemic but we acknowledge that required an extra effort to stay online while the rest of us were chatting and smiling in the breaks. So, thank you for having stayed with us throughout the meeting.
Thank you to our two vice chairs for having so ably supported the chair in his functions: the, HonorableMinisters of Malawi and of Uganda. I’d like to also thank the ministers who were the rapporteurs who worked in the background with my colleagues in the secretariat.
To all our Member States, honorable ministers, your technical teams and partners, please accept my deep gratitude for the rich and stimulating observations that have been shared, the experiences that we talked about and the pertinent questions that you raised in what has been a very rich conversation.
I’d like to apologize for the fact that we kept you up so late. I think in our excitement of being with you, werather failed the program with many, many subjects. And I thank you for having accepted to work early in the morning, to work through lunch in side-events, to work in the evenings until quite late. I promise you that the next meeting, we’ll try to be more considerate of the fact that you also have to rest sometimes. Thank you for your commitment to our discussions.
I especially appreciate the insights you have shared onmany, many subjects. If I can just step back and think, we were talking in the context of pandemic about humanitarian crises and pandemics and going towards resilience while ensuring that we don’t neglect the rest of the health agenda we continue to provide health services and we start to tackle some of the emerging areas, like non-communicable diseases that really are presenting a problem for us in the region.
I noticed there was a lot of conversion in the comments and the ideas that were proposed. Some of the words I noticed were resilience, equity, integration, primary health care, capacity building, scaling up, innovation, exchange of experiences, support, partnership, engagement of the community, multi-sectorality, leadership, moving toward self-sufficiency, and of course leveraging technology and innovation in our work.
I was very impressed by the degree to which these came out recurrently and we seem to be reaching agreement that these were the primary strategic approaches that we need to follow in our work in taking our region beyond the COVID-19 pandemic towards the sustainable development goals for health and the Africa goals 2063. So we are encouraged by this and I would like to promise you that in some of the reforms that we are doing in the secretariat, the way that we are organized and in the way that we approach the work on health, we will have heard what you have said. We will try and, in our own work as a secretariat, to be less fragmented, to be more people centred, to push for integration, to promote very much a strong emphasis on primary healthcare so that we can indeed address the issues of inequity that reverberated throughout our discussions and continue to move forward to improving the health of African people.
Going forward I also noted your strong interest in engagement in some of the global discussions and negotiations that are taking place, including those that will enable us to face the next pandemic as a global community with the requisite attention to equity and sharing the benefits of research and innovation andensuring that we are responsible as Member States to each other’s fate and we minimize the risk of transmission for communicable diseases from onecountry to the other.
So again, thank you for demonstrating the interest in going on with the negotiations that are going on at the global level. And as I indicated, if any additional information is required for us to support you in that engagement, we are very ready as your secretariat to do so.
To conclude without going into any further repetition of what we discussed, I’d just like to indicate that we are still, unfortunately, with the COVID-19 pandemic. Wehave enjoyed a period where the number of cases in our region has been relatively low over the past few months as have the number of deaths.
Our investment with you in the response to the pandemic has left some assets that are going to be more broadly available for healthcare delivery for other problems in the region.
In addition to COVID-19 we are facing a polio outbreak and thank you for the attention that was paid to that matter. We are determined that we will not lose our status of having eradicated wild polio virus type I in the region. We will work with you to close the other epidemics, outbreaks.
We have found language to deal with vaccine derived polio and we will spread this around and communicate with you and our polio team will ensure that this is how we speak about this now in the future.
I won’t list the decisions that you made, the regional strategies that you adopted, and just note that they address very much, non-communicable diseases, the environmental impact on health, thus reminding us of the need to address other determinants of health. I was very happy to see that others were very much engaged on that process.
I’d like to thank all the member states who proposed side events in which we all participated very actively. I thank our moderators, the speakers, the panelists, our translators, and the people who were working in the background to make sure that our meeting was fruitful in this very wonderful forum that the Government of Togo provided for us. Thanking those who helped us produce the documents that enabled the discussions to take place.
And I'd like to say again to His Excellency the President, Honourable Minister and the people of Togo, thank you for hosting us in this wonderful facility and for your hospitality.
I’d like to thank our team in AFRO especially. This has been a piece of work that has gone on for almost a year: my directors, our colleagues from headquarters, our country representatives (we brought a number ofcountry representatives here) and other colleagues who worked in the background to ensure we had a meeting that we conducted smoothly and successfully.
Finally, I was deeply touched by the discussion in the context of the venue of the next Regional Committee. I’d like to thank you Ministers for the recognition of my contribution to our work and just say that this is something I could never have done without having a strong team to support me every step of the way.
I thank the honorable minister of Mauritius for having offered to share with us the rich experience and achievement of that country and I hope we can find the occasion to go to Mauritius for a Regional Committee. If it is when I have transitioned out of WHO, I will find a way to attach myself to a delegation some way or other and be there as well.
So thank you all for an extremely rich session after we hadn’t been together for a couple of years. And I look forward to our continuing work throughout the year and to seeing you in Gaborone in 2023.