The Gavi Secretariat welcomes the Lusaka Agenda released today on Universal Health Coverage Day, and we thank the Future of Global Health Initiatives (FGHI) Co-Chairs, Dr Mercy Mwangangi and Dr John-Arne Røttingen, and all members of the FGHI Secretariat, Steering Group and Committees for leading this important initiative. FGHI has provided a vital platform to bring focus to improving the way global public health is delivered, and dialogues such as those in Addis Ababa, Wilton Park and Lusaka served as critical opportunities to catalyse momentum for FGHI and share reflections among global health stakeholders.
Gavi was set up as an Alliance of the key actors in global health, including WHO, UNICEF and the World Bank. Part of Gavi’s raison d’être is to drive greater alignment across diverse partners, by drawing on their comparative strengths to bring impact on people’s health. For this reason, Gavi has appreciated the opportunity to engage throughout the consultative FGHI process and share our learnings from over 20 years of supporting routine immunisation and strengthening health systems, with implementing countries firmly in the driving seat. We support FGHI’s efforts to shape the global health agenda in a way which promotes collective action, and we are committed to continually evolving our model based on the needs of the countries we work with.
Gavi further appreciates the light FGHI shines on the critical role Gavi must play in the future global health landscape. Indeed, we are actively applying learnings from the FGHI process in how we engage with global health partners outside the Alliance, such as the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria (Global Fund) and the Global Financing Facility (GFF), as well as CEPI and Africa CDC.
Gavi has worked closely with the African Union, Africa CDC and other partners to design an innovative financing mechanism, the African Vaccine Manufacturing Accelerator (AVMA), aimed at establishing a sustainable African vaccine manufacturing industry capable of improving the region’s resilience in the face of pandemics, outbreaks and other health emergencies as well as the health of global vaccine markets.
When it comes to operational alignment, Gavi has established workstreams across areas of joint work with the Global Fund and with the GFF to build cohesion at the global level. These will be developed in earnest in 2024. These efforts build on ongoing streamlining processes at the country level, for example Gavi has supported more than 40 countries to integrate immunisation data into the Digital Health Information System II, an electronic platform shared by many other health programmes and jointly supported by the Global Fund, USAID, and NORAD, among others. More information on our collaboration with the Global Fund can be found in the 2023 Partnership Report.
Gavi looks forward to supporting the next phase of the FGHI agenda as we shift to implementation of the priorities highlighted in the Lusaka Agenda, and continuing to grow our collaboration with other GHIs, driven as always by countries and our goal of achieving true health equity.
The statement can be downloaded here.