Opinion | COVID 19: Why Investing in Health is Critical to Global Development
One minute you are reading about pioneering medical technology behind the implanting of bionic eyes to restore sight to blind people. The next you learn that a disease you have never heard of – Schistosomiasis – infects over 200 million people and leads to 200, 000 deaths a year. Before you have taken in the fact that diseases such Asian flu, HIV/AIDS, and Polio among others, which used to be a global killer, has almost been wiped out, you find a new killer stalking the global block – like COVID 19.
This devastating illness has incredibly quickly, from Wuhan city, the sprawling capital of Central China’s Hubei Province, to over 212 countries and territories, infected 5, 555, 737 people all over the world and taken 350, 212  lives (as of 27 May 2020). This is not surprising, in a highly mobile, cheek by jowl world, the poor health of someone in one country can affect (or infect) someone in another. In an interconnected and interdependent world like ours, bacteria and viruses travel almost as fast as e-mail messages and money flows. Globalization has shrunk distances, broken down old barriers, and linked people together. It has also made problems halfway around the world everyone’s problem. And we know that, like a stone thrown on the waters, a difficult social or economic situation in one community can ripple and resonate around the world.
The COVID-19 pandemic has created unprecedented disruption for the global health and development community. Organizations fighting infectious disease, supporting health workers, delivering social services, and protecting livelihoods have moved to the very center of the world’s attention. But they find their work complicated by challenges of access, safety, supply chain logistics, and financial stress like never before. The short-term implications of this global challenge are evident everywhere, but the long-term consequences of the pandemic — how it will reshape health and development institutions, occupations, and priorities — are still difficult to imagine. It is expected that COVID 19 pandemic will force a reexamination of global health architecture to promote an approach to sustainability that significantly increases investment in emergency preparedness.
The emergence of COVID-19 has put greater value on data, research, and epidemiological surveillance — things regularly used in public health — now supercharged to inform a pandemic response.
More importantly, COVID-19 has revealed the need to invest more in health facilities. Health before wealth is an old adage that can be readily understood by looking at the links between ill health and poverty in developing countries. Good health boosts labor productivity, educational attainment and income, and so reduces poverty. When poor people know their children are more likely to survive and be healthy, they tend to have smaller families and so higher incomes per family member. So programs that aim to protect and improve the health of people below and just above the poverty line in developing countries could greatly help in the battle against global poverty. These links between health and poverty reduction have been strongly confirmed in many research on the determinants of economic growth in developing countries.
And this has helped place health higher on the international agenda than ever before, not just because of efforts to generate economic growth or because of the battle against COVID 19, but because poor people have higher than the average child and maternal mortality, higher levels of disease, and limited access to health care and social protection. When poor people become ill or injured, the entire household can become locked in a downward spiral of lost income and high health care costs.
To meet this challenge, developing countries need to take a pro-poor health approach. This must do what it says: promote, protect and improve the health of poor people. It necessitates targeting diseases that affect these groups disproportionately. Malaria, for example, causes the premature deaths of one million people each year, while globally 42 million people are living with HIV/AIDS.
Diseases linked to tobacco lead to a further four million avoidable deaths each year, half of them in developing countries. Malnutrition and food insecurity have obvious implications for health. Road fatalities are another public health concern, though often not seen as such; yet, in developing countries, about a million people are killed every year as a result of road crashes. Indoor air pollution is a health hazard resulting from the use of cheap biomass for heating and cooking which causes the deaths of two million people a year, usually poor women and children.
Therefore, resolving these problems will require not just the efforts of health ministries, but coordination with departments of agriculture, transport, education, and energy, to name but a few. Such is the nature of pro-poor health approaches. Certainly investment in health is critical, which is why ‘philanthrocapitalism’ such as Africare, Bill & Melinda Gate Foundation, Foundation for NIH (FNIH), and Welcome Trust among others, may have a big role to play.
*Abdulfatai is a freelance researcher, writer and editor. He writes from Ilorin and can be reached on obiograph@gmail.com or/and @AbdulfataiTomori on Twitter.
