Kawooya: We Need National Pandemic Response Fund to Reduce Donor Dependency

The State Minister for Health – General Duties, Hon. Anifa Kawooya, has advised African states to have a national pandemic response fund if they are to effectively respond to any potential disease outbreak before it escalates.

She said this while sharing Uganda’s experience in the COVID-19 response during her keynote address at the First African International Conference For Health Harm Reduction in Morocco.

“Heavy reliance on donor funding during a response to an outbreak, makes it clear that we need to review our health system financing mechanisms, to reduce donor dependency. There is a need for countries to put aside a national pandemic response fund, to be able to respond quickly to potential outbreaks before they escalate,” she strongly advised.

In the same address, the Minister affirmed Uganda’s commitment to reducing health risks with reliance on the accumulated experience in the management of other disease outbreaks like Ebola Virus Disease.

“Uganda’s history of managing recurrent outbreaks of highly infectious diseases has created an institutional memory and outbreak response mechanisms, which made it easy for Uganda to rapidly and effectively activate the country to COVID-19 response through existing systems and structures,” She said.

She noted that Uganda was able to take social determinants of health approach to its response by catering for vulnerable populations like refugees and people with low social and economic statuses.

Concerning regional health safety, she highlighted that Uganda cooperated with its neighbours in implementing pandemic control measures at points of entry.

One of the strategies employed was the Regional Electronic Cargo and Driver Tracking System (RECDTS), a mobile phone app that allows cargo drivers to cross borders with COVID-19 digital certificates. This app allows sharing of COVID-19 test results of drivers between EAC states, reducing the need for testing in multiple countries.

The challenges Uganda faced in the COVID-19 response were immense, she noted, but these have acted as building blocks for a better health system.

“Because of pandemic pressures created by the shortage of pandemic response medical countermeasures, for example, Uganda stimulated national innovation and manufacturing capacities for pandemic Medical countermeasures (MCMs) such as PPEs and pharmaceuticals like COVIDEX,” she noted.

Other key lessons she noted are the need for global solidarity in sharing trade-related intellectual property rights to scale up the production of life-saving technologies, specifically vaccines, for populations where the need was great, especially in low-income countries; and the need for stockpiling mechanisms and systems for the pandemic response, for future responses to disease outbreaks to combat shortages during the response.

The conference is aimed at building on the African experience and expertise in the perspective of the lessons learned from the Covid-19 pandemic, and to highlight the importance and practical means of improving health determinants and preventing major health risks to concretely lay the foundations for a viable and sustainable continental health sovereignty based on common future vision.