African governments are falling far short in their commitments to prioritize public spending on health care, contributing to widespread inequalities in healthcare access and outcomes, Human Rights Watch and the Kampala-based Initiative for Social and Economic Rights (ISER) said today. As the 23rd anniversary of African Union states’ historic commitment approaches, new data reveal alarming stagnation, widening regional inequalities, and pointing up the need to correct course.
On April 27, 2001, African Union (AU) governments adopted the Abuja Declaration, in which they set a target of allocating at least 15 percent of their national budgets to improve health care. But recent analysis of two decades of data found that only two of the AU’s 55 member countries — Cabo Verde and South Africa — met this target in 2021, the most recent year for which data is available.
“It is disappointing that African countries have failed to meet health spending targets they set,” said Allana Kembabazi, the ISER program manager. “The impact of this is felt in lives lost as a result of underfunded, poor-quality public health systems. Covid-19 underscored that it is more important than ever for governments to finance health care.”
Despite the global surge in public healthcare spending amid the pandemic in 2021, on average African governments spent only 7.4 percent of their national budgets on health care, less than half of what they had pledged 20 years earlier. Overall, about 95 percent of people in Africa lived in a country that did not meet this spending target that year.