Health Action AIDS
Health Workforce Advocacy Initiative Launches Campaign for Sustainable Financing
International advocacy for an expanded, motivated, well-equipped health workforce took a step forward last month when advocates from seven countries met to chart a path forward for the Health Workforce Advocacy Initiative (HWAI). HWAI is a civil society-led network of the Global Health Workforce Alliance (GHWA). Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) chairs this initiative, which is one of four working groups of GHWA. GHWA is the international partnership, launched in May 2006 and hosted by the World Health Organization, that is dedicated to advocating for a health workforce that is capable of achieving the health Millennium Development Goals and enabling everyone to benefit from essential health services.
HWAI, which had operated as the Advocacy Working Group until July 2007, began operations in early 2007, initially targeting its advocacy work at the G8, the Global Fund, and the African Union health ministers. (See some of the Advocacy Working Group documents prepared for these events.)
In July, more than a dozen advocates – hailing from Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, Thailand, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, and the United States – and about half of whom are themselves health professionals – met in Washington, DC, for their first face-to-face meeting. Two days of meetings – followed by a productive day educating members of Congress about the African Capacity Health Investment Act – resulted in the launch of a new Campaign for Sustainable Financing for the Health Workforce and plans for a number of associated activities. HWAI members chose this focus because the necessary, dramatic strengthening of the health workforce and the broader health systems in which health workers operate cannot be achieved without sustainable financing for the health workforce and health systems, and because the necessary level of funds will not come easily.
Initial activities will include developing a white paper to analyze and critique major bilateral and multilateral health initiatives from the standpoint of the necessary investments in the health workforce, developing an advocacy toolkit to support in-country advocates seeking sustainable financing for the health workforce and broader health systems, and feeding into ongoing and health workforce planning processes. HWAI will also engage with international funders, including the Global Fund and others, to advance efforts to enable countries to develop, and receive the necessary levels of external funding needed to implement, robust and human rights-based national health strategies, including comprehensive health workforce strategies.
HWAI also plans to focus some of its work at country level, initially in support of advocates in Uganda, including PHR's partner and HWAI member Action Group for Health, Human Rights and HIV/AIDS. This will include taking advantage of a significant opportunity for raising the profile of major health workforce needs when the Global Health Workforce Alliance holds its first Forum, which will draw hundreds of people to Kampala in March 2008.
In September, HWAI will also begin a concerted effort to nurture a broader international network of health workforce advocates, as well as to expand its own membership.
HWAI members include Physicians for Human Rights (chair), the Action Group for Health, Human Rights and HIV/AIDS, the Kenya Health Rights Action Network, the Africa Public Health Rights Alliance, the African Council for Sustainable Health Development (ACOSHED), the Asia-Pacific Action Alliance on Human Resources for Health, Health Gap, the International Council of Nurses, Oxfam UK, Stop TB, and the Global AIDS Alliance, with the Global Health Workforce Alliance Secretariat serving as an observer.
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