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Health Promotion director calls for health in sectoral policies

Dec 30, 2019, 2:56 PM | Article By: Pa Modou Cham

Modou Njie, the director of Health Promotion over the weekend emphasised that all sectors should consider health in the implementation of policies and strategies.

Njie who was speaking at NaNA in a two day Sectoral Policy Review for implementation of health in all policies, said if the sectors are developing their policies or strategies, they should not forget about health.

“We had the first engagement in 2015, where we brought about technicians, politicians and other decision makers to brief them of the outcome of the helfin declaration on health policies in 2013, focusing on health in all policies,” Njie stated.

He further indicated that the whole idea is for every sector to ensure that they talk about health, put health in their policies and allocate adequate funds to the health sector. He added that with that they can go above the Abuja 15% declaration of budget allocation for the health sector.

“We want to inform other sectors that whatever they do with their budget, will have huge impact to the health and distribution of health in the country,” he said.

Momodou Gassama, the representative of World Health Organisation (WHO) dwelt on the importance of the review, stating that it’s to chart the way for better health in the country for the present and future generation.

He added that health is very fundamental in “whatever we do in our development agenda,” while emphasising that no development can take place without health.

“Health is beyond health because whatever we do will impact on health, whether directly or indirectly.”

He expounded that the health sector will change its gears in term of mobilising the necessary resources, strategies and capacities to champion health in all other sectors, in order to reinforce what they are doing.

Alpha Bah, representative of the Ministry of Basic and Secondary Education pointed out that “if we take a look at the composition of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), we will realise that in each sector, one cross cutting issue is health.”

“In our policy, we have the school health, which we talk about health facilities and health service delivery related to our school system,” he further pointed.