Your Excellency Dechen Wangmo,
My sister Dr Poonam Khetrapal Singh, WHO Regional Director for South-East Asia,
Excellencies, dear colleagues and friends,
Tashi delek. Good afternoon.
Once again, I thank the Kingdom of Bhutan for its hospitality in hosting this year’s meeting of the Regional Committee for South-East Asia.
You have a full agenda this week, reflecting the complex and diverse range of challenges faced by all Member States in the region.
Your agenda also reflects the five priorities I outlined in my address to the World Health Assembly three months ago.
Promoting health;
Providing health;
Protecting health;
Powering health;
And performing and partnering for health.
Allow me to discuss each one briefly.
First, promoting health.
Realising our vision for the highest attainable standard of health starts not in the clinic or the hospital, but in schools, streets, supermarkets, households and cities.
Much of the work that you do as Ministries of Health is dealing with the consequences of poor diets, polluted environments, unsafe roads and workplaces, inadequate health literacy, and the aggressive marketing of products that harm health.
That’s why we are calling on all Member States to make an urgent paradigm shift, towards promoting health and well-being and preventing disease by addressing its root causes, and creating the conditions for health to thrive.
This is especially true for addressing the burden of noncommunicable diseases.
This week you will consider an Action Plan for Oral Health in South-East Asia and a Draft Regional Action Plan for integrated people-centred eye care.
The success of both plans will depend largely on your ability to work with your colleagues across government to address the drivers of poor oral and eye health.
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The second priority is providing health, by reorienting health systems towards primary health care as the foundation of universal health coverage.
We know that 90% of essential health services can be delivered at the primary health care level.
I’m very pleased to note that service coverage in the region has improved significantly since 2010, although of course the challenge remains to ensure services are available to the poorest, most marginalised and hardest-to-reach groups. After all, it’s not universal health coverage if it’s not universal.
I also urge all Member States to make a priority of addressing the significant barriers to financial protection that many of your people continue to face, with unacceptably high levels of catastrophic and impoverishing health spending.
Of course, attention to service coverage and financial protection must be complemented by attention to disease-specific programmes.
So I’m pleased to see that accelerating progress towards the SDG target on TB, as well as the elimination of cervical cancer, are both on your agenda this week.
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The third priority is protecting health, by strengthening the global architecture for health emergency preparedness, response and resilience.
The global monkeypox outbreak is yet more evidence – if any were needed – that the world’s collective failure to address neglected diseases in neglected communities puts us all at risk.
As you know, Member States are now negotiating a new international accord or treaty on pandemic preparedness and response, and at its last meeting, the International Negotiating Body agreed that this instrument would be legally binding. Which is very good news.
I urge all South-East Asian Member States to engage actively in this process.
I also welcome the Regional Strategic Roadmap on Health Security and Health System Resilience for Emergencies, as well as the Regional Roadmap on Diagnostic Preparedness, Public Health Laboratory Networking and Genomic Surveillance.
Both roadmaps are an important complement to global and national plans to strengthen health security.
I would especially like to thank Indonesia for its leadership in making health emergency preparedness and response as part of its G20 Presidency.
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The fourth priority is powering health, by harnessing science, research, innovation, data, and digital technologies.
Advances in science and research are constantly pushing back the boundaries of the unknown and the impossible, increasing our understanding, and opening new possibilities.
Innovations in health products and service delivery give us hope of overcoming challenges that once seemed insurmountable.
Developments in big data and machine learning are helping us to see who is being left behind, where the biggest gaps are, and to track progress against our targets.
And digital technologies offer huge potential for delivering health services in new ways, to more people, especially in hard-to-reach areas.
To pick up the pace towards the “triple billion” targets and the SDGs, we must pick up the pace and scale at which science, research, innovations and digital technologies are adopted and implemented.
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The fifth priority is performing and partnering for health, by building a stronger WHO that delivers results, and is reinforced to play its leading role.
The pandemic has demonstrated not only why the world needs WHO, but why the world needs a stronger, empowered and sustainably financed WHO.
I thank all Member States for the historic commitment you made at this year’s World Health Assembly to gradually increase assessed contributions to 50% of the base budget over the next decade.
This commitment will transform the Secretariat’s ability to deliver results where it matters most – in the lives of the people we all serve.
Maintaining momentum is vital, as the first step towards sustainability comes with the proposed 20% increase on assessed contributions in the 2024-25 budget.
As you know, even before the pandemic, we had already made major improvements in effectiveness and efficiency through the transformation journey that we have been on over the past five years.
Building on the lessons of the pandemic, we are committed to continuing that journey, and to making WHO even more effective and efficient.
In particular, our focus in the coming years is to significantly strengthen our country offices to support greater country capacity and greater country ownership – especially by strengthening the health workforce of every Member State.
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Excellencies,
In the past five years, I have had the honour of meeting many of the people we serve, in this region and around the world.
Ultimately, our work is not about roadmaps, action plans, strategies and agenda items, as important as those things are.
Our work is about people – and particularly the people who are poorest; the people who are most marginalised; the people who are furthest behind.
That is why we’re here.
And that is why I look forward to working with you for the next five years, as we work together to promote, provide, protect, power, perform and partner for health.
Kadrin chhe. I thank you.
