High Level Forum on Health MDGs: Abuja Action Plan
In September 2004, the High Level Forum on Health MDGs met in Abuja, Nigeria to put forward an action plan addressing the HRH crisis in Africa. That plan -- Addressing Africa’s Health Workforce Crisis: An Avenue for Action -- identified five core principles to address the crisis.
• Country-led action, global responsibility, and collective solidarity: All responses must emerge from country level, which also requires political commitment and resource allocation.
• Learn from experience and build on it: Efforts to accelerate the response must build on ongoing work.
• Go beyond the health sector: Critical issues must be communicated to key decision makers and those who influence them.
• Seize the opportunities: Although there is increased attention to health issues, including to meet the MDGs, most of these funds are not going toward strengthening health systems.
• Train, retain, and sustain: The core issues is improving and increasing the training of African health workers and addressing issues such as adequate compensation and working conditions.
Finally, the agenda called for five main avenues of action:
• Country-led leadership:
o Improving motivation and retention
o Mobilizing trained staff into workforces
o Engaging not-for-profit and for-profit private sector
o Improving productivity of health workforce
• Overcoming macroeconomic constraints and recruitment ceilings: Key macroeconomic and fiscal reforms should be kept in mind when drawing up health workforce policies related to scaling up. This should involve donors and ministers of health, finance, education, and planning.
• Exploring mechanisms to resource educating health workers: Efforts must address both quantity and quality of the workforce. And while there is a need to fund and build educational facilities, it must be recognized that some countries will need support in this regard. One possible solution is the creation of a pooled education fund.
• Technical cooperation:
o Technical assistance: Although this must be demand driven, it is an area where international and bilateral agencies must quickly mobilize assistance.
o A technical cooperation network: Such a network should build on existing efforts and would review requests for support, analyze country needs, provide broader conceptual thinking, and identify available HRH experts.
o International volunteers: This should largely be a short-term fix and should be accompanied by transition strategies and local capacity building objectives.
• Better intelligence for HRH: Service provision has been a neglected area of research, and solutions must be evidence based, with more research on education, skill-mix, retention and incentives, availability to improve need based planning and strategy development.
For more information on the high-level forum meeting in Abuja, see www.hlfhealthmdgs.org/December2004Mtg.asp
The report is available at: www.hlfhealthmdgs.org/Documents/AfricasWorkforce-Final.pdf
