Written by Dr. Jean Kaseya, the director-general of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) stated that 60% of traditional foreign health aid to Africa was essentially wasted.
The waste was due to fragmentation, inefficiencies, and cases where foreign aid didn’t align with specific government priorities.
This assertion, which suggests African countries need significantly less aid than previously received, was made during a Devex Impact House event and was supported by Dr. Lia Tadesse Gebremedhin, the former Ethiopian health minister, who suggested the inefficiency could sometimes be even higher, more like 80%.
Moving forward, they feel the reduction in external funding and inefficiencies could be an opportunity to take more ownership and provide national governance in order to move away from aid dependency. One of the goals is to have African countries spend at least 15% of their national budgets on health care. They also mentioned having continental use of pooled procurement of health products to drive down costs, along with the elimination of fraud. Â They also shared the work done in Ethiopia to intentionally drive donors to align around one national plan and one budget (pooled fund).
You can read the entire article at https://www.devex.com/news/africa-cdc-chief-60-of-foreign-health-aid-was-effectively-wasted-111049