Health, a human right
Bern, 21.08.2015 - At the Annual Development Cooperation Conference of the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation SDC and the State Secretariat for Economic Affairs SECO, the focus was on healthcare – a priority theme for Swiss development cooperation, given the key contribution it makes to peace, security and economic stability. In his opening speech, Federal Councillor Didier Burkhalter also looked ahead to the future, setting out both the principal points covered by the new Dispatch on Switzerland's International Cooperation in 2017-2020 and the global 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which will take on next year from where the Millennium Development Goals have left off.
The main themes of the annual conference, held at the Congress Center Basel, were health and the poor access to necessary healthcare services in many parts of the world, such as medical services, medicines and information. Health is a human right, yet some 400 million people around the world have no access to healthcare.
In his opening speech, Mr Burkhalter stressed the importance of access to services and the relationship between this and poverty. “Poverty is not only a result of inadequate income. It is like an octopus, spreading out its tentacles where there is a lack of access to basic healthcare and education", said the head of the Federal Department of Foreign Affairs (FDFA), who expressed the view that poverty was also caused by a lack of prospects, discrimination and legal uncertainty. According to him, climate change and lack of access to water exacerbated the situation. He continued that health formed a central plank in the fight to alleviate poverty, adding that good health was a fundamental right of every human being.
In this connection, Mr Burkhalter also turned to the new Dispatch on Switzerland's International Cooperation in 2017-2020, observing that poverty, conflicts and global risks such as climate change were intertwined and that an integrated approach was therefore needed to respond to the relevant challenges. For this reason, a joint strategy for the SDC, SECO and the FDFA’s Human Security Division will be adopted with this new Dispatch: "In view of the increasingly tight link between development and peace, to be more effective I think it is important that the relevant offices work even closer together and take a complementary approach." Mr Burkhalter stated that no social or economic development was possible without peace and security: “People do not go to school or work when they are being bombed”. He added that with the new Dispatch’s emphasis on sustainability, Switzerland will be fully equipped to play a key role in ensuring the success of the global 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The 2030 Agenda, to which Switzerland is strongly committed and which it has actively helped to devise, in particular with regard to the issue of health, is due to be adopted in New York in the autumn and will take the place of the Millennium Development Goals from 2016 onwards.
SDC Director, Ambassador Manuel Sager, also looked to the future in his speech. In his view, achieving the goals set out in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development would require not only commitment from governments and public development agencies but also cooperation with NGOs, the scientific community and a private sector prepared to take responsibility for delivering environmentally and socially sustainable development. This type of alliance would also be crucial in providing greater access to healthcare: “Forging broad-based partnerships of this kind is the only way to ensure that medicines such as antimalarials for children can be developed and administered where they are most urgently needed”, said Ambassador Sager.
Around 29,000 children under the age of five still die every day from malaria and diarrhoea. Every day, over 4,000 people die of tuberculosis, and some 800 women and girls die as a result of complications during pregnancy and childbirth. Treatment costs, long distances to healthcare centres and a mistrust of doctors are all factors: where people do not have access to treatment, then hospitals, medicines and trained healthcare staff all remain powerless, said Ambassador Sager. The SDC was committed to ensuring better access, he said, since improving people’s health was a fundamental tool in combating poverty, the central focus of the SDC’s work.
Ahead of Ambassador Sager’s speech, the 1,100 or so attendees listened to a number of presentations on health and on Switzerland’s work in this field. Edna Adan Ismail, founder and manager of a university hospital in Somaliland, described the practicalities of setting up a healthcare system under extremely difficult circumstances in a country ravaged by civil war. In his speech, Hans Rosling, Professor of International Health in Stockholm, put forward the view that there are no longer just two types of countries in the world – industrialised and developing – but that there are instead 192 different countries, all in a permanent state of socio-economic development, with many Asian countries advancing at twice the rate of progress as once in Europe. The conference was also an opportunity for Swiss and foreign experts to discuss, in panels, the challenges faced in terms of access to medicines, information for young people, and healthcare with specific emphasis on healthcare funding.
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