Africa's health care spending in serious need of policy overhauling!

Africa is in serious trouble. We have war, political turmoil, financial crisis, educational shortfalls, drought, famine and a phenomenal health problem. I am no pessimist, and I truly love Africa as it is my home, and I believe that given the correct opportunities this continent can stand as proud as Europe and North America in a decade or so from now.

Africa has all the necessary resources it requires to become a self sustainable continent, however corruption, mismanagement and stupidity in some cases are amongst the reasons why Africa lacks behind in terms of development, education, health care and financial stability.

It seems that 9 out of the 10 serious TB nations are found in Southern Africa alone, collectively, Africa has a higher AIDS prevalence than any other randomly chosen 2 continents combined.
80 million Africans are lost to Aids, TB, child and maternal mortalities each year, which is more then the sum of the population of Botswana and Sierra Leone.

Africans are expected to live 36 years of their lives as healthy people, relative to 67 years in developed nations.

Cuba, who have a population of 12 million, currently have 67 000 registered medical professionals, whereas Malawi has 300 doctors, Zambia has 900 and Zimbabwe has 2000.
Because of a lack of budget spend we lose our medical professionals to countries who have better salary and benefits structure for health care professionals. We spend millions in training, only to lose our trained professionals to developed nations.

Our African nations promised to spend 15% of their national budgets on health care, however many of our nations spend as little as 3%. Botswana is listed as the most commendable, who spend 23% of annual budget on its health care systems and training.

The US managed to save $20billion by attracting 250 000 health care professionals who were neither born nor trained in the US. They look at it as $20 billion saved, us Africans need to look at it as $20 billion lost!

This figures are not 100% accurate, as I have encountered variations to these figures during my research, however I have based values listed above on the African Public Health Rights Alliance findings.

Sphere: Related Content