Leon Barretto

Healthcare services in African countries are poorly attuned to meet the needs of the poor, the disabled and other vulnerable groups, with coverage of essential healthcare services in Africa decidedly low, said the report. Nearly half of all deaths and about a third of disabilities in low and middle-income countries could be avoided if people had access to emergency care. In Africa the main causes of emergencies are road accidents, obstetric complications, severe illnesses and non-communicable diseases. But to address these challenges data is needed on the number of hospitals, their locations as well as the population marginalized. Most countries in Africa don’t have this information. They lack basic inventories of health care service providers, including the number of hospitals

In sub-Saharan Africa, at least one-sixth of the population lives more than 2 h away from a public hospital, and one in eight people is no less than 1 h away from the nearest health center.  The report showed that coverage of essential services needed by women and girls in Africa is low, with data indicating that between 2015 to 2019, only 49% of African women had their demand for family planning satisfied by modern methods.

Economic Burden.

The disease burden in Africa continues to increase. This includes both the communicable disease burden and the increasing non-communicable diseases that are mainly lifestyle diseases. With this increase, governments have had to correspondingly raise their spending on healthcare services in African countries. Finally, in low and middle income countries (LMIC) there is often a lack of supply of skilled doctors and nurses which might influence costs and health effects of delivering a particular healthcare technology.  Increasing the size and skills of the workforce is often not that easy and raising wages to increase the workforce in low income countries might have limited success as it is difficult to compete with wages in Western countries