December 7, 2022 Dear U.S. and African Leaders, The December 2022 United States of America (U.S.) and Africa Leaders’ Summit (Summit) presents a timely opportunity to strengthen strategic collaboration between the U.S. and Africa. As the pandemic enters its fourth year, it continues to set back progress on health, development, climate change, food security and poverty reduction goals, and hamper the world’s ability to tackle other global crises. Pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response (PPR) must be elevated and sustained by all leaders as a top cooperation and investment priority. At the Summit, we therefore call on all leaders to: Financing: Commit to secure sustainable financing necessary to accelerate investments in PPR across sectors, including mobilizing political and financial support for the Pandemic Fund. - Advance a sustainable financing plan to close the new Pandemic Fund’s estimated gap of US $10.5 billion/year and to become a co-investor in the Fund. We also urge leaders to adopt a Global Public Investment model for the Fund, whereby all countries, at all income levels, contribute to PPR as a public good and share in its benefits. We particularly urge African leaders to consider investing in the Pandemic fund as it presents an opportunity to mobilize significant, additional, long-term funding to complement and support national and regional pandemic preparedness efforts.
- Endorse reforms to the IMF, World Bank, and other Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) to unlock additional multilateral financing for PPR and fiscal policies to alleviate the debt burden on African nations. COVID-19 has greatly increased the inequality gap between high- and lower-income countries, and has fueled a growing debt crisis that threatens public investments toward Universal Health Coverage and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
- Redouble their efforts to close the remaining access gaps for lifesaving tools across Africa, both for COVID-19 but other resurgent disease threats such as Ebola and mpox. With COVID-19, we witnessed the potential of collaborative international efforts like the C-TAP initiative to foster open technology sharing to accelerate equitable global access to vaccines, treatments, diagnostics and other tools.
US-Africa regional cooperation: Ensure a coordinated, coherent, and collaborative approach to strengthen national and continental health security. - Articulate plans to fully implement the ambitions laid out in the New Public Health Order in Africa. Doing so will require collective leadership and respectful partnerships among governments, private sector, and civil society to bolster Africa’s public health institutions; increased and sustained investments in local manufacturing, supply and delivery chains for lifesaving medical countermeasures and tools in Africa; and a strengthened health workforce that will expand access to affordable, quality primary health care and has the necessary surge capacity to respond to outbreaks and emerging pandemic threats.
- Prioritize the filling of capacity gaps related to biosecurity and biosafety as part of the larger health security architecture and in alignment with Africa CDC’s Biosafety and Biosecurity Initiative. Biosecurity is globally under-represented as a policy and financial priority. Africa CDC has made great strides in spotlighting the importance of addressing accidental and deliberate biological threats, but significant policy and capacity gaps pose a serious concern for regional and international security. US-Africa regional cooperation will be enormously beneficial in building a safer and more secure Africa as it relates to man-made pandemics.
R&D: Invest in health research and development (R&D) and expand access to lifesaving tools. - Commit to increased, coordinated, and sustained investments in health R&D to support regional and national core capacities, technology co-creation, and enhanced manufacturing to rapidly develop and deploy new and advanced medical countermeasures that meet the unique needs of countries and communities in Africa.
- Lay out their plans to meet their commitments in the Maputo declaration of 2007 to allocate 1% of their domestic GDP to R&D, and for US and African leaders to explore bilateral arrangements to incentivize these investments. Africa hosts 15% of the world’s population and carries 25% of the global disease burden, yet accounts for only 1% of global investments in R&D and 2% of world research output.
- Forge agreement on the temporary suspension of patents and IP rights for lifesaving medical tools during pandemics. The failure of the TRIPS waiver for COVID-19 points to a glaring roadblock in the global system that, if not addressed, will once again stymie equitable access to vaccines and other lifesaving tools in future pandemics. Leaders should also ensure that the principle of equitable access is reflected in the various deliberations underway on the global PPR architecture, including the reviews of the ACT-Accelerator and International Health Regulations, and the forthcoming negotiations on a potential Pandemic Accord.
One Health: Prioritize a One Health approach to address emerging health threats. - Champion the inclusion of a One Health Approach (human, animal, and environmental) to health security, including in the forthcoming negotiations on a potential Pandemic Accord, and the creation of a permanent global One Health structure to provide countries with technical and scientific support in One Health implementation from prevention of spillover, to surveillance of threats, to response. Such a holistic approach to emerging infectious disease threats is urgently needed, given the increasing frequency and depredation of climate and public health related events.
Pandemic Leadership and Accountability: Ensure inclusive mechanisms to elevate political will and drive accountability for action. - Commit to participate in the UN High-Level Meeting on PPPR in 2023 and to work together to ensure that the HLM accelerates action and elevates governance of the pandemic PPR agenda. Outcomes for the HLM should include establishing a high-level global council to monitor and address emerging pandemic threats, and instituting an annual global review and accountability process and forum to assess progress and identify priorities for targeted action and investment.
At the Summit, we urge you to commit to these actions to address the impacts of COVID-19, reclaim pre-pandemic health and development gains, and help prevent another deadly and costly pandemic from happening again. Yours respectfully, Access Challenge ACCESS Health International ADET (Amis des Étrangers au Togo) Amref Health Africa Association For Promotion Sustainable Development AVAC Black Emergency Managers Association International Coalition for Health Research and Development (CHReaD) Conservation International COVID Survivors for Change East African National Networks of AIDs and Health Services Organization (EANNASO) Friends of the Global Fight Against AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria Foundation for Environmental Watch (FEW) Gavi CSO Constituency Global Health Technologies Coalition (GHTC) Goodbye Malaria Healthcare Foundation Organization (HFO) Heart that Cares for Better Health Organization IntraHealth International ISE International Group KANCO Management Sciences for Health (MSH) Nigeria Health Watch NTI ONE Organization of African Youth Organization of Christian Writers Pandemic Action Network Panorama Global PATH US REACH Ethiopia Resolve to Save Lives Right to Health Action SAMOCRI Seed Global Health Spark Street Advisors Speak up Africa Stowarzyszenie Higieny Lecznictwa (SHL) Uganda Child and Aid Development Foundation (UGACAD) Uganda Peace Foundation Union des Amis Socio Culturels d'Action en Développement (UNASCAD) Village Reach WACI Health Wote Youth Development Projects (WOYDEP) |
