By Vincent Gunde
President Dr. Lazarus McCarthy Chakwera has appealed to delegates attending the World Economic Forum during a session of Investing in Health Equity.
He urged the nations to implement initiatives that are aimed at investing in health systems so that they do not lose their place on the list of priorities.
Dr. Chakwera said this loss of investments in health is not merely a fear, but a reality that critical players like the Global Fund are having to contend with as contributing nations are re-assigning their resources to emerging geopolitical emergencies like the war in Eastern Europe.
Delivering a keynote address to the World Economic Forum session on investing in health equity, President Dr. Chakwera said investing in filling the health systems gaps and inequalities that the pandemic has exposed in developing nations like Malawi is an investment in the stability of the global economy and it must be done by all stakeholders.
Dr. Chakwera said the Global Fund have given Malawi’s health facilities the capacity to save millions of lives from malaria, which is the number one killer in Africa as well as Tuberculosis and Hiv/Aids.
He said the only way to safeguard the global economy from health related disruptions people have experienced in the past two years is to ensure that there is equitable health care across the globe.
The Malawi President said public health is the bedrock of economics saying people are now painfully aware that if the health of any nation citizens cannot be guaranteed, it threatens the very foundations of the economy.
He said people are also painfully aware that the economies of all nations are so inextricably linked that a corona virus outbreak in the Eastern World or a monkey pox outbreak in the Western World can have devastating effects on economies in the Global South.
“If the experience we have had with Covid-19 in the past two years is anything to go by, people must deal with security emergencies without compromising investments in public health, the future of our economies depends on it,’’ said President Chakwera.
