Did you know there are more than seven billion mobile phone subscriptions around the world? That means more people have mobile phones than toilets. Mobile phones have the power to reach people in places that electricity and roads don’t yet reach. The potential to harness this connectivity for better health is there. But can we reach this potential?
Today we speak to Rifat Atun, Professor of Global Health Systems and Director of the Global Health Systems Cluster at the Department of Global Health and Population, Harvard University School of Public Health, about the critical role of public–private partnerships in strengthening health-care systems.
Christophe Harerimana, a school teacher for more than 20 years in Rwanda, became worried in recent years. Many of his students were coming to class ill and were having trouble concentrating. “The children were having abdominal pain, diarrhoea and nausea. This made it difficult for them to follow the lessons,” says Harerimana, who teaches science and Kinyarwanda, the local language of his village, in the Musanze District.
Target 6 of draft sustainable development goal 3 is “By 2020, halve the number of global deaths and injuries from road traffic accidents”. Today, Daily Development talks to Etienne Krug from the World Health Organization about how progress can be made towards achieving that target.
Like the fast-growing city where it was launched, with new buildings under construction everywhere, the Addis Ababa Action Accord provides us with scaffolding for a new global agenda on development finance. The negotiations were tough and at times deadlocked, but does the final agreement deliver for the world’s poorest?
Last year, the African Union—an assembly of 54 African nations—formally committed to ending hunger in Africa by 2025. This is incredibly ambitious, considering one out of every four people in sub-Saharan Africa is undernourished.
Addis might be close to having its outcome document, but the hard work of parsing old money from new commitments and tapping better data to monitor progress toward the sustainable development goals is yet to begin.