Doha Global South Health Policy initiative makes great progress: Gates Foundation official

The Doha Global South Health Policy initiative launched in February 2024 by various Qatari stakeholders in partnership with Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is making steady progress focusing on primary healthcare in global south countries selected for the programme, disclosed a top official of the Gates Foundation."We had a roundtable with the participating countries in Africa during Doha Forum. It was clear in a number of the presentations, to potentially use some of the digital technologies to help improve primary health care in those countries,” Dr Chris Elias, president of the Global Development Division at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation told Gulf Times in an exclusive interview."During the discussions, the countries have identified one or two projects where Qatar could partner with them on strengthening the health workforce or improving the digital transformation within the primary health care system,” he highlighted.The official said that the focus will be on the underlying immunisation and maternal and child healthcare part for a strong primary healthcare system in these countries."So, there were a number of project ideas presented. I think the next step will be to see if there's a potential match on some of those projects where Qatar might support some of the countries directly and then actually try to disseminate the learnings,” continued the official.The partnership with Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Middle East Council on Global Affairs was formed with the support of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Qatar in February 2024, to create an innovative platform that aims to leverage the experience and know how of senior public officials from the Global South.The Qatari stakeholders are the Ministry of Public Health, Qatar Fund for Development, Qatar University, Hamad Bin Khalifa University, Qatar Charity, and Qatar Red Crescent and the participating countries are: Nigeria, Somalia, Congo, Burkina Faso, Mozambique, and Malawi."The roundtable showed a tremendous amount of promise, as it brought forward some very important voices from senior technical people in a variety of countries to talk about their perspective on what their needs were and how the donor community could better coordinate with them. We had really insightful presentations from Somalia, Malawi and Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Congo, and Mozambique,” explained, Dr EliasAccording to Dr Elias there were several important takeaways for the Global South countries form the meeting. "They need to focus on workforce development, financing for critical health development initiatives and collaboration with the private sector. They also have to look at the potential for digital technology to be transformative in some of their programmes. The presentations included their thinking across some of the key priorities on immunisation, maternal health, primary healthcare, and presented some specific ideas,” he elaborated.Dr Elias noted that Gates Foundation works in a very focused way in a number of those countries. He remarked : "We also have other projects in Malawi and Somalia, as well as in Mozambique. So we work in all of those countries and in some of them more intensively. The one that we work in the most is Nigeria. In the last 18 months, Nigeria has prioritised primary health care and they have increased their domestic funding for primary healthcare.”"We have outlined a plan going forward that would involve having an annual convening, with the next in the fourth quarter of 2025 and in the subsequent years. In the meantime, there is going to be a community of healthcare practitioners in several areas among these countries,” added Dr Elias.