2007 G8 Summit Position Statement

Health Systems
Ensuring Affordable Medicines
Peace and Security
Education

In recent G8 Summits the United States’ leadership has been critical in advancing debt relief and other aid assistance to the poorest countries of the world, particularly in Africa. The major new initiatives of the administration, PEPFAR (President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) and MCA (Millennium Challenge Account), have resulted in a more than doubling of aid to Africa, providing twice as much bi-lateral aid than any previous administration. InterAction commends the administration on their leadership and has supported both PEPFAR and the MCA since the beginning.

At the 2005 G8 Summit in Gleneagles, Scotland G8 countries made a set of historic commitments to help end extreme poverty, especially in Africa. The promises include: increasing development assistance; fighting HIV/AIDS and malaria while strengthening health systems; canceling unsustainable debt of the poorest countries; expanding access to education, clean water and sanitation; and additional support for humanitarian responses and peacekeeping work, infrastructure and agricultural development. Progress has been made on these commitments, however much still needs to be accomplished. It is essential that the G8 countries continue to move towards meeting the 2005 commitments.

This year, during the 2007 G8 Summit, we call attention to four specific areas where we believe the United States can once again play a leadership role: health systems in relation to HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment, ensuring affordable medicines, peace and security, and education in Africa.

HEALTH SYSTEMS

I n two annual reports, the World Health Organization cited weak health systems and lack of health care workers as major hindrances to addressing global health problems, particularly in Africa.  Last year, in St. Petersburg, the G8 acknowledged that inadequate health care systems and the severe shortage of health care workers in sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere are compromising countries' abilities to meet HIV/AIDS and other health goals. In its 2006 communiqué, the G8 committed to improving access to prevention and treatment of diseases for those in need. This includes assistance programs focused on strengthening the capacity of health systems and the training, deployment, and retention of qualified health workers; as well as innovative clinical research programs, private-public partnerships, and other innovative mechanisms. 

We urge the United States to work with its G8 colleagues to establish a global initiative on health systems strengthening that will assist countries in developing and implementing clear, long-term and costed plans for expanding and strengthening their public health systems. 

We urge the G8 communiqué to commit to specific financial resources to ensure that all people have equitable access to a skilled, motivated, equipped, and adequately compensated health workforce. The G8 should work with partners to develop ambitious yet achievable timelines and benchmarks towards achieving this goal.  

Experts from Harvard and the World Health Organization-chaired Joint Learning Initiative have estimated that $2 billion is needed from all sources in the first year of an effort to double Africa’s health workforce. The U.S. share of this is $650 million. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), by 2015 the annual need will reach $7 billion simply to train and employ the additional 800,000 doctors, nurses, and midwives that Africa requires. Overall, WHO estimates that countries face critical shortages of 4.25 million health workers.

We also urge the United States and other G8 nations to commit to ensuring that fiscal and monetary policies are in place to enable countries to implement health sector plans, including immediate revision to policies that have led to hiring freezes on health workers and teachers.  The plans should incorporate comprehensive health workforce strategies, provide for necessary equipment, supplies and maintenance, promote education necessary to change household behaviors to enhance disease prevention, and address other barriers to increasing health care coverage.  We further call upon the United States and other donor nations to adopt policies to develop self-sustainable health workforces to meet their own health workforce needs while following ethical recruitment practices.

ENSURING AFFORDABLE MEDICINES

Ensuring medicines are affordable to all is critical to achieving Universal Access to Treatment. Drastic reductions in the price of key medicines are needed to maximize and sustain the impact of funding for HIV and AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria. This is necessary to ensure affordable prices for all other medicines critical to supporting and building public health infrastructure in developing countries, including medicines for non-communicable diseases. Market competition, through the production and distribution of generic medicines, is the most effective way to achieve these reductions.

Remove trade barriers blocking access to essential medicines

The G8 should provide all necessary financial, political and technical assistance to ensure that the TRIPS flexibilities can be used, both to address infectious diseases and to address the high cost of medicines to treat non-communicable diseases.

The G8 should urgently review the effectiveness of the TRIPS flexibilities, including the WTO “Paragraph 6 Amendment” to the TRIPS agreement. The “Paragraph 6 Amendment” is intended to facilitate the delivery of affordable medicines to developing countries with insufficient or no domestic manufacturing capacity and to identify and resolve all obstacles to their use.

G8 countries and the EU should openly exclude conditions that restrict the use of TRIPS flexibilities, or otherwise impair access to medicines, in bilateral trade agreements.

Ensure that the U.S. and EU enforcement agenda is not imposed upon developing countries through the WTO, and that any enforcement mechanism does not impair access to affordable, generic medicines.

Supporting WHO's investigation of intellectual property legislation and R&D initiatives

The G8 should support the right of the WHO’s Intergovernmental Working Group on Public Health, Innovation and Intellectual Property (IGWG) to include actions related to intellectual property in its global strategy. The G8 should encourage the IGWG to discuss all the recommendations of the WHO Commission on Intellectual Property Rights, Innovation, and Public Health (CIPIH), and to provide opportunities for serious discussion of R&D priorities, and funding mechanisms that promote both innovation and access.

PEACE and SECURITY

We welcome the intention of the G8 to review the progress towards the 2002 G8 commitment to support the creation of an independent African security architecture. We especially support the long-term goal of strengthening the African Union and African regional institutions in peace-building and conflict prevention and the critical role therein of civil society. Given the continued insecurity and violence in Darfur, we appreciate the present and planned USG support for the AU, and call on the US Government to urge your G8 counterparts to provide similar financial, logistic and other types of support. We call on the G8 to make a concerted effort to ensure women’s participation in all stages of conflict prevention, resolution, and peace building as an essential element of increased civil society involvement.

Further, InterAction encourages the G8 members to remain fully engaged and committed to the international efforts to address peace and security. This includes the UN Peace building Commission, the June 2006 Geneva Declaration on Armed Violence and Development, and the establishment of an International Arms Treaty for Africa.

EDUCATION

Last year in conjunction with its leadership on this issue, the United Kingdom announced a 10-year, $15 billion commitment to funding international basic education and meeting the challenges of reaching Education for All (EFA) by 2015. This added funding is very important, but much still needs to be done.

Seventy-seven million children today have no access to school. Thirteen percent of the developing world’s children are not in school. In sub-Saharan Africa that number soars to over 34%. Tens of millions drop out and hundreds of millions are in schools where the quality is woefully inadequate. Almost half of the children not in school are living in countries in conflict or recovering from conflict.

HIV/AIDS is making it harder for children to go to school, stay in school, and learn. It is decimating the teacher population in countries across Africa. At the same time, we know that getting and keeping children in school, particularly girls, is an important social vaccine against HIV/AIDS. 700,000 HIV infections could be prevented each year getting children in school.

Educating girls is one of the most effective development investments. The children of educated women have higher survival rates, better nutrition, and are more likely to attend and succeed in school. Providing education for girls boosts economic productivity and reduces poverty, increased life expectancy, promotes better management of environmental resource, and improves the health, well –being, and education prospects of the next generation.

Education is not only critically important for economic development and poverty alleviation, but it is also an important tool in fighting terrorism, promoting democratization, and building civil society.

We commend President Bush’s proposed funding increase for basic education in his FY’08 budget. Still more needs to be done for the promise of EFA to be fulfilled. We urge the Administration to commit to increasing basic education funding at the G8 beyond the President’s proposed level through both the Fast Track Initiative and through bilateral funding of innovating programs. One billion dollars in funding would enable significant progress to be made in achieving EFA and would help to ensure that all children in this work have hope and opportunity.

For questions or comments please contact:

John Ruthrauff
Senior Manager Member Advocacy
InterAction
1400 16th Street, NW Suite 210
Washington DC 20036
jruthrauff@interacton.org
202-552-6523.