Health sovereignty focus of Nairobi summit following US aid cuts

By Rédaction Africanews with AFP

US aid cuts to Africa marked the death blow of an “outdated” development system and should push the continent to take charge of its own services, the heads of the World Health Summit said Wednesday.

The overriding theme of the three-day summit in Nairobi, attended by 15 African health ministers and thousands of NGO and academic delegates, was “health sovereignty” for the continent, which sees an opportunity in the loss of donor funding.

Massive aid cuts by Western donors, especially United States President Donald Trump’s decision to scrap the $40bn-a-year USAID agency, have been highly controversial in the West, but have been welcomed by many Africans who say aid has fuelled corruption and lethargy in their governments for decades.

The aid system in Africa was based on the idea of “poor medicine for poor people,” Lukoye Atwoli, the summit’s co-host, told reporters.

“That era is gone,” he said, pointing to countries like Kenya that have implemented comprehensive insurance and modern facilities, even if there are still plenty of teething troubles.

The cuts are a second “wake-up call” after the harsh lessons of the Covid pandemic, when Africa was last in line for vaccines, added World Health Summit president Axel Pries.

“We don’t have the virus, but we have a political virus,” he said.

“This political change completely changes the paradigm of how health systems are financed… You need more local financing. We all have to do away with this donor-recipient paradigm, which is much outdated,” he said.

Not congratulating Trump
So should Trump be praised for ripping off the bandage?

“Rather than congratulating Trump, I would say: never spoil a good crisis,” Pries told AFP.

Aid cuts were “something which would have happened anyhow at a certain point in time. But the way it was done was completely unacceptable,” he added, highlighting the “brutal” stop that left millions suddenly unable to access life-saving treatments for HIV/AIDS and other diseases.

Pries was also damning of the new US bilateral approach to aid in which it has pulled out of global institutions like the World Health Organisation and instead sought deals with individual countries, reportedly demanding access to resources and health data in exchange for funds.

Several African nations have raised the alarm, saying their data will be harvested to create treatments that will not be shared with them.

“So I’m a little worried about individual treaties which make… data a commodity which is no longer available to the broader family of nations,” said Pries.

He took an oblique swipe at the Trump administration, saying: “It’s a little bit irritating when a group of people who are otherwise talking about ‘alternative facts’ and creating a lot of misinformation have such an interest in real data.”

“The alarm bell has to ring.”