Critical stakeholders, including policymakers, health leaders, and global partners, have called on Africa to close its health gap through stronger, integrated, more equitable systems and funding.
At the opening of the 2025 Gatefield Health Summit in Abuja yesterday, the stakeholders underscored the deep disparities in global health.
According to them, Africa carries 25% of the world’s disease burden yet receives only 3% of global health spending. In Nigeria, per-person health expenditure stood at an average of just $5 annually, compared to $4,500 in Europe.
They also called for coordinated financing, women-centered policy and African-led innovation to close the continent’s health gap, stressing that resilient health systems cannot exist without women at their core.
In his keynote address, Adewunmi Emoruwa, lead strategist at Gatefield, observed that the biggest question facing the world today is why Africans are dying younger than they should.
“This loss of potential is the crisis. The difference between a life lived in the Global South and a life in Europe is the resilience of our systems — the gap is resilience,” he said.
On the inequity in health investment in Africa, Emoruwa said the continent is “actively defunding life,” citing Nigeria’s 97% cut to its national family planning budget.
He urged governments and citizens alike to reimagine domestic funding, noting that “if just 1% of diaspora remittances were directed toward systemic health interventions, Nigeria’s health budget would grow by $200 million overnight.”
In her remarks, a public health practitioner and official of Invictus Africa, Adenike Adeoye, noted that investment in women’s health can enhance economic growth, leading to increased workforce participation and high productivity.
The president-elect of the International Diabetes Federation, Dr Niti Pall, emphasised prevention and innovation in primary care centres as key to transforming care.
She said, “We need to train primary care health practitioners with better tools to treat their patients better.”
In separate remarks, the founder of Call-off Cancer Initiative, Dr Ummi Umar, and the Advocacy Lead at Gatefield, Shirley Ewang, lamented the rising burden of non-communicable diseases caused by individual habits and the growing threat of antimicrobial resistance (AMR), which, if unaddressed, could claim 10 million African lives annually by 2050.
