Creating Medical Capacity

Health cooperation is a core part of Africa-China relations

- Benard Ayieko

At least half of the world’s population, approximately 3.9 billion people, still does not have full access to basic health services, with the largest percentage of the affected population coming from the least developed and developing countries, mainly in Africa, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). It said that the situation is made worse by the revelation that about 100 million people cannot afford to pay for their basic healthcare services, ostensibly because they are sliding into the extreme poverty zone, living on just $1.9 or less a day.

With over 930 million people, nearly 12 percent of the world’s population, spending at least 10 percent of their household budgets to pay for essential health services, the call by the UN member states to achieve universal health coverage by the year 2030, as part of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), could not have come at a better time.