I am delighted to welcome and participate in the first day of the Institutionalising Community Health Conference , which focuses on Accelerating PHC at the Community Level.

For many years, I successfully led Nigeria’s CSO PHC Revitalization Support Group which advocated successfully for Nigeria’s redemption of the Abuja Declaration Pledge of 1% Consolidated Revenue Fund to Health. The 2018 Basic Healthcare Provision Fund BHCPF HUWE, Comprehensive Community Healthcare has remained a core target of my Wellbeing Foundation Africa’s mission, vision and actions ever since.

By addressing the wider factors that may delay or hinder the holistic delivery of Community Health Management and Quality, enables us to place a strategic lens on how optimal health outcomes, and increased equitable access to care can, and should remain a priority. 

Globally, when we demonstrate an intentional, collective and results-based commitment to the facilitation of Universal Health Coverage and a quantifiable delivery of a Continuity of Care, we are able to actualise equal access to health care, move into promoting a truly universal and affordable healthcare system, and most importantly, place quality at the heart of community care – for any and all. 

It is important to galvanise funding and action in order to strengthen primary care access and in order to keep essential public health services functioning. 

How do we succeed in doing so? By ensuring that the primary conversations held ahead of any disbursement, allocation, policy creation or protocol implementation is being had with the most remote and vulnerable people in mind – and within view. This is how we collectively maintain our social and civic responsibility, as well as keeping the integrated health services of every community alive. 

Multi-sectoral policy and action must reflect and empower the very people and communities it is formed to serve, and the health and wellbeing of said individuals is the effective and most precedential place to begin – and continue.

For me, strengthening localised approaches to UHC, means we can successfully begin the transition into delivering community health coverage (CHC) – a journey where  the task and charge is to minimise discrimination, strengthen and revive strained approaches to cultural sensitivity, and straighten the pathway to putting the ‘U’ in universalism. 

We must increase targeted and inclusive investments and make the road to care more generally accessible – starting with Maternal and neonatal health. When we recognise the importance of EmONC training, facilitation and care – including displaced persons and refugees – we make the case for equitable access even stronger. Factors such as malnutrition, language barriers, no fixed address and underlying health / obstetric conditions place these women and neonates within a higher risk category and makes them more prone to complications; preconception, antenatally, intrapartum and postnatally.

What then is the purpose of Institutionalizing Community Health? A revival; a call to action that requires true, palpable and equitable action to take place.