Monrovia — Senior officials of the Africa Centers for Disease Control are holding meetings in the U.S capital, Washington D.C., to discuss future collaboration between the U.S. government and the continental health body, in light of funding cuts by the administration of President Donald Trump.
“We see the change as opportunity,” head of the Africa CDC Incident Management in the DR Congo Ngashi Ngongo said. Ngongo was speaking during an online briefing on Thursday, March 27, to give updates on the status of the mpox virus in the region.
Ngongo said the talks, which followed similar discussions with European nations, were necessary to keep up with the “rapidly changing global environment”. He was referring to the freezing and subsequent cancellation of over 80% of U.S. foreign aid programs under USAID – the U.S. government’s primary aid agency – which the new administration plans to “reorganize”.
“The 5,200 contracts that are now cancelled spent tens of billions of dollars in ways that did not serve the core national interests of the United States,” U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in March, and the 1,000 remaining programs would now be administered “more effectively” under the State Department.
The scrapping of the programs will affect life-saving aid for disease prevention and the mitigation of extreme hunger. Several African countries with a fifth of their assistance coming from USAID, including South Sudan, Somalia, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Liberia, will be particularly “exposed”, according to the Center For Global Development (CGD). “In Liberia, basic health is the main sector while in Uganda it is population and reproductive health,” the CGD report said.
Ngongo said the funding move was preceded by a decline of Official Development Assistance, “with 30% of overall health expenditure in the region coming from foreign aid”. The increasing need to service debt, he said, also affected investment in the health sector.
The Africa CDC official said only two African countries met their obligation under the Abuja declaration, which calls on countries in 2001 to allocate 15 percent of national budgets of health to tackle rising health challenges. He said the regional health body is urging governments to pursue new strategies to address their health needs – including aggressive domestic resource mobilization and the introduction of health insurance – while also calling for the “optimal use” of limited resources and the curbing of corruption.
The continental health watchdog said it’s moving into the “intensification phase” of its fight against the virus, with the hope of getting it under control in the coming months.
More than 3,000 cases were “notified” in the 11 weeks of reporting, and more than 900 cases confirmed. The numbers represent an increase from the previous week.
Uganda, Burundi, and DR Congo, account for more than 90 percent of the cases, which Ngongo says demonstrates “sustained community transmission”.
