We’re at the halfway point between the upcoming Federal Budget and World Health Day – so it’s a great time to reflect on the links between health, aid and the achievement of the MDGs.

World Health Day is celebrated on 7 April every year to mark the anniversary of the founding of World Health Organsiation (WHO)  in 1948. This year, World Health Day focussed on Ageing and Health with the theme “good health adds life to years”.

Did you know that the number of people today aged 60 and over has doubled since 1980? And that the number of people aged 80 years and over will almost quadruple to 395 million between now and 2050? Such staggering statistics have prompted many to think about how good health is directly linked to people leading full and productive lives.

On World Health Day, AusAID recognised the successes of its aid programs that promote good heath in developing countries. The main purpose of AusAID is to help people overcome poverty. This has been achieved through a wide range of health initiatives, such as establishing community health clinics in East Timor, training health workers in Vanuatu, and decreasing infant mortality rates in Nauru.

In 2011-12, AusAID contributed around $759 million to improve the health of the world’s poorest people. It has been recognised that good health is a human right and is a means to achieving other development goals so it’s imperative that the MDGs, particularly those relating to good health outcomes, remain a priority.

You can help ensure that the MDGs remain a priority by taking action today to remind the Government that overseas aid, and the MDGs, should be at the top of the agenda in the lead up to the Federal Budget.

Written by Melissa Gillies, MPH Online Contributor.

Image sourced from the Make Poverty History website.

CHOGM has come and CHOGM has gone with much talk about the lack of any tangible results that warrant the expense of bringing 53 of the world’s leaders together, especially in the area of human rights. However, the impact of campaigning by thousands of Make Poverty History supporters did pay off on the host country Australia who came forward with two solid initiatives on polio and food security.

I attended the Commonwealth People’s Forum and the buzz word for CHOGM was ‘potential,’ usually prefixed with the word ‘great’ or ‘unreached’. An example of this is the CHOGM Eminent Persons Group working to get support for a CHOGM Human Rights watchdog – a terrific idea that was unfortunately watered down to become a series of ministerial meetings.

CHOGM was, however, a great rallying point for Make Poverty History who kept the issues alive with the public and in the media. Thousands of supporters were involved in a variety of actions from flash-mobs, juggling acts, forums, dinners and training workshops to stalls, press conferences, concerts, speaking events, and even the unveiling a statue representing the Millennium Development Goals.

I was involved in organising stalls to get the public to sign the MPH/GCAP letter to the CHOGM leaders supporting action on the MDGs, particularly those relating to health. I also chaired a workshop in the Peoples Forum on International Trade and Finance, and organised a climate change action (together with the Australian Youth Climate Coalition) that involved the en mass reading of a letter asking CHOGM leaders for action on climate change and spelling out the message in giant letters.

While there were no big wins from CHOGM as a group, the effect of campaigning was not wasted on the Australian Government who used CHOGM as a backdrop for two major announcements that were very welcome.  This first was an extra $50million funding to eradicate polio and the second, an initiative to create a Food Security Centre focussed on providing research to deliver better outcomes for small scale farmers, especially those needing to adapt to drier conditions caused by climate change.

There was such great energy at CHOGM with so many inspiring people. CHOGM definitely has the potential to live up to its ideals, but unfortunately without progress in the area of human rights and meaningful engagement with civil society, CHOGM will continue to limp along as the lame duck in the world of international meetings.

The next CHOGM has ‘Women as agents of change’ as its theme. With 2 billion people across 6 continents represented within CHOGM, let us hope that this time it lives up to its great potential as an instrument for progress on global issues.

Written by Paddy Cullen, Campaign Coordinator, Oxfam Australia

A massive scale-up in malaria control programmes between 2008 and 2010 has resulted in the provision of enough insecticide-treated mosquito nets (ITNs) to protect more than 578 million people at risk of malaria in sub-Saharan Africa. Indoor residual spraying has also protected 75 million people, or 10% of the population at risk in 2009. The World malaria report 2010 describes how the drive to provide access to antimalarial interventions to all those who need them, called for by the UN Secretary-General in 2008, is producing results.

Downward trend in malaria

In Africa, a total of 11 countries showed a greater than 50% reduction in either confirmed malaria cases or malaria admissions and deaths over the past decade. A decrease of more than 50% in the number of confirmed cases of malaria was also found in 32 of the 56 malaria-endemic countries outside Africa during this same time period, while downward trends of 25%–50% were seen in eight additional countries. Morocco and Turkmenistan were certified by the Director-General of WHO in 2009 as having eliminated malaria. In 2009, the WHO European Region reported no cases of Plasmodium falciparum malaria for the first time.

Results: the best in decades

The WHO Director-General, Dr Margaret Chan, highlighted the transformation that is taking place, “The results set out in this report are the best seen in decades. After so many years of deterioration and stagnation in the malaria situation, countries and their development partners are now on the offensive. Current strategies work.”

“The phenomenal expansion in access to malaria control interventions is translating directly into lives saved, as the WHO World malaria report 2010 clearly indicates,” said Ray Chambers, the UN Secretary-General’s Special Envoy for Malaria. “The strategic scale-up that is eroding malaria’s influence is a critical step in the effort to combat poverty-related health threats. By maintaining these essential gains, we can end malaria deaths by 2015.”

Strategies to fight malaria

The strategies to fight malaria continue to evolve. Earlier this year, WHO recommended that all suspected cases of malaria be confirmed by a diagnostic test before antimalarial drugs are administered. It is no longer appropriate to assume that every person with a fever has malaria and needs antimalarial treatment. Inexpensive, quality-assured rapid diagnostic tests are now available that can be used by all health care workers, including at peripheral health facilities and at the community level. Using these tests improves the quality of care for individual patients, cuts down the over-prescribing of artemisinin-based combination therapies (ACTs) and guards against the spread of resistance to these medicines.

Fragility of malaria control

While progress in reducing the burden of malaria has been remarkable, resurgences in cases were observed in parts of at least three African countries (Rwanda, Sao Tome and Principe, and Zambia). The reasons for these resurgences are not known with certainty but illustrate the fragility of malaria control and the need to maintain intervention coverage even if numbers of cases have been reduced substantially.

Work remains to attain targets

The report stressed that while considerable progress has been made, much work remains in order to attain international targets for malaria control.

• Financial disbursements reached their highest ever levels in 2009 at US$ 1.5 billion, but new commitments for malaria control appear to have levelled-off in 2010, at US$ 1.8 billion. The amounts committed to malaria, while substantial, still fall short of the resources required for malaria control, estimated at more than US$ 6 billion for the year 2010.
• In 2010, more African households (42%) owned at least one ITN, and more children under five years of age were using an ITN (35%) compared to previous years. Household ITN ownership reached more than 50% in 19 African countries. The percentage of children using ITNs is still below the World Health Assembly target of 80% partly because up to the end of 2009, ITN ownership remained low in some of the largest African countries.
• The proportion of reported cases in Africa confirmed with a diagnostic test has risen substantially from less than 5% at the beginning of the decade to approximately 35% in 2009, but low rates persist in the majority of African countries and in a minority of countries in other regions.
• By the end of 2009, 11 African countries were providing sufficient courses of ACTs to cover more than 100% of malaria cases seen in the public sector; a further 5 African countries delivered sufficient courses to treat 50%–100% of cases. These figures represent a substantial increase since 2005, when only five countries were providing sufficient courses of ACT to cover more than 50% of patients treated in the public sector.
• The number of deaths due to malaria is estimated to have decreased from 985 000 in 2000 to 781 000 in 2009. Decreases in malaria deaths have been observed in all WHO regions, with the largest proportional decreases noted in the European Region, followed by the Region of the Americas. The largest absolute decreases in deaths were observed in Africa.

In summary, the report highlights the importance of maintaining the momentum for malaria prevention, control, and elimination that has developed over the past decade. While the significant recent gains are fragile, they must be sustained. It is critical that the international community ensure sufficient and predictable funding to meet the ambitious targets set for malaria control as part of the drive to reach the health-related Millennium Development Goals by 2015.

First published on WHO

In Ethiopia, 94 percent of women deliver their babies at home, without the aid of a trained birth attendant. Follow Liya Kebede, the World Health Organization’s Global Ambassador for Maternal, Newborn, and Child Health and a native of Ethiopia, as she learns firsthand the challenges facing mothers and newborns and how new U.S.-funded programs are helping to shift the odds in their favor.

Part of ONE’s Living Proof campaign

If you noticed the Oaktree Twitter feed going a bit wild this week, it’s because a bunch of us had the pleasure of attending the United Nations Department of Information (UNDPI) conference at Melbourne’s Exhibition Centre.

The theme, “Advance Global Health: Achieve the MDGs” was chosen to refocus our efforts on achieving goals 4, 5 and 6: “reduce child mortality”, “improve maternal health” and “combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases”.

Basically, the conference was to act as a precursor to the MDG summit that will be held in New York later this month. The idea being that the NGO community would band together and find innovative ways to put health MDGs back on the map (currently they are the goals that are least likely to be achieved by the 2015 deadline).

Did the conference actually achieve this?

I’m not sure. The large contingent of Oaktree delegates managed to cover a lot of ground and attend most of the speaker sessions and workshops. But by and large, the reports I got from my colleagues sounded the same.

People in Oaktree found the sessions informative and enjoyed hearing from experts; but found it frustrating that there was no forum to discuss the things we’d just learned. There were plenty of networking opportunities, but no space where we could collaborate with our new contacts. And there were so many NGOs in attendance who wanted to push their own agendas that it was easy to feel like we couldn’t produce concrete outcomes. By the end of the conference you could hear an audible groan from the Oaktree peeps every time a delegate got up during a roundtable, ignored the expert debate that had just occurred, and hijacked the microphone to exclaim, “Learn Esperanto!!”

With that said, the youth session run on day two of the conference was wildly successful. I’m not just saying this because one of the speakers was our own Nick Allardice. The four speakers (Nick, Alice Bleby, Alischa Ross and Chris Varney) eschewed the customary panel discussion and divided the session into four groups where we could workshop our ideas for achieving the health MDGs.

I found Chris Varney’s (former UN Youth Representative) workshop particularly inspiring – the thirty or so people involved were taken through a hypothetical scenario aimed at breaking down generational barriers in the aid sector. The young people in the room were asked to put themselves in the shoes of a 40 year old manager in the aid sector and the older people were asked to take on the persona of a youth volunteer. Together, we nutted out the barriers that stop us from working together effectively, and came up with practical solutions.

It was useful to identify the different things that older and younger people bring to the table. This might sound naive, but having been in the youth sector for so long, I hadn’t properly thought about the qualities that skilled older people possess: experience, wisdom, a focus on accountability, and an outcomes-based approach.

Similarly, the lady who was sitting next to me (who was in her 60s) told me that she felt reinvigorated by the qualities that young activists have: optimism, innovation, technological awareness and stamina.

The workshop ended on a great note, and the participants hung back well into the lunch break to exchange contact details and make plans to collaborate again. Everyone agreed that all of our ideas would be useful in achieving the MDGs.

Well. Almost all of them. Naturally there was one gentleman who stood up and told us that the best way to halve extreme poverty by 2015 would be for “everyone to learn Esperanto.”

Patsy Niklas is Oaktree’s Communications Director
Originally posted on the Oaktree Foundation Blog

The G8 summit has agreed to provide a further $5bn (£3.3bn) over five years towards improving the health of mothers and young children in the developing world. Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper made the announcement at the summit in Toronto.

The funds are intended to help tackle one of the international targets known as the UN Millennium Development Goals. But anti-poverty groups say the pledge does not meet the scale of the problem.

Together with other donations, including one from the Gates Foundation, the full pledge will amount to $7.3bn. One of the Millennium Development Goals is to reduce by three-quarters the death rate among mothers and young children.

Mr Harper said he would like to achieve even more. ”We are committed to moving the world towards the day when women in developing countries will not die or suffer disabilities from pregnancy or childbirth,” he told reporters.

However development lobby groups say they are disappointed by the $5bn pledge. One said the initiative failed to meet the needs of many mothers and children in the poorest parts of the world. Campaigners have also heavily criticised the G8 for falling short on a promise made at a previous summit to increase total development aid.

By Andrew Walker – BBC economics correspondent, Toronto