Qatar will continue working as an active partner in the international community to enhance the goals related to humanitarian and developmental work, calling for allocating more resources towards these endeavours.
This came in the statement of Qatar read by HE the Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Sultan bin Saad al-Muraikhi at a conference on investment in education and employment in the health sector, which took place at the headquarters of the United Nations in New York.
The minister said that Qatar plays a leading role in realising the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) on the local, regional, and international levels, through providing assistance in the face of humanitarian and economic challenges and crises.
HE al-Muraikhi said that Qatar appreciates the election of Her Highness Sheikha Moza bint Nasser as a UN SDG Advocate, one of 17 prominent persons.
The minister said that Qatar is first among Arab countries in supporting the UN and humanitarian organisations, providing aid and gifts, including the financing of UN organisations with $500mn, which was announced in December 2018.
HE al-Muraikhi also noted the contributions by civil society organisations in Qatar to sustainable development efforts at the regional and international levels, through providing basic services, humanitarian aid, reconstruction efforts, financing, basic education, and employment opportunities to millions of people around the world.
He noted that the contributions of “Education Above All” and the Qatar Fund for Development reached $736mn to support healthcare in Africa and the Middle East in the last six years.
The minster also praised Silatech for the role it plays in empowering youth through training and job opportunities, as well as by empowering more than 1.3mn youths in 17 countries in the Middle East and North Africa region.
HE al-Muraikhi highlighted that Silatech and its partners committed to providing 5mn job opportunities to young people all over the world by 2022.
The minister noted that the world today faces many challenges on the economic, humanitarian, developmental, and societal fronts.
He lamented the lack of jobs in the healthcare sector, saying that it is an obstacle to providing good healthcare to people, leading to critical humanitarian crises.
HE al-Muraikhi stressed the need to deal with this challenge, which could reach 18mn job openings in the healthcare sector worldwide by 2030, in order to realise the SDGs.
The minister also stressed on the importance of ensuring the quality of workers in the healthcare sector through education and training.
He expressed appreciation of the World Health Organisation (WHO)’s efforts in dealing with that challenge through comprehensive plans and programmes.
HE al-Muraikhi also welcomed the co-operation between the WHO and Silatech on the “Working for Health” programme, which aims to provide 1.9mn job opportunities by 2022 in Africa.
WHO director-general Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told the conference that universal health coverage is not achievable without an adequate healthcare workforce.
“But there is a danger because of the huge gap” in needed workers.
This can only be solved with co-operation among many parties.
“At the WHO, we developed the SDG action plan, and 12 UN agencies have come together on it,” he said.
“All roads lead to universal health coverage,” Ghebreyesus said. “Half of the world’s population does not have access to essential health services.
“A hundred million people annually go into poverty because of out-of-pocket. This is a tragedy. And this has to be addressed.
“We have to honour the pledge of reaching universal healthcare by 2030.”
Ghebreyesus stressed that the central element of reaching that goal is increasing the workforce.
“We have to train more, and we have to retain them,” he said.
Norway’s Health Minister Bent Hoie said that “training health workers is the key to achieving this goal the Sustainable Development Goal of universal healthcare”.
“But the statistics are alarming,” he said. “There will be a deficit of 18mn health workers in the world in 2030.”
“We need to work better in health prevention and health promotion, we need to use more technology and to find new models to deliver health services,” Hoie said. “It is no option to leave people without the care they need because the doctors, nurses, and midwives are not there.”
“We cannot deprive people of healthy lives for the simple reason that we do not invest enough in health workers,” he added.
Hoie said that only 4% of global healthcare workers are in Sub-Saharan Africa.
“They care for 24% of the global disease burden,” he said. “This is an unacceptable situation.”
“Spending on education and health workers is not a cost, it is an investment, with high returns,” Hoie said.
Investing in health workers can power economic growth and improved global security, the Norwegian minister said, as well as improve the lives of women, who make up the majority of health workers.
Hoie said that while the primary responsibility for training health works rests with governments, there must be an international response.
He said that with Silatech, Norway supported the creation of a global trust to help meet the goal of financing training for the millions of new health workers needed.
Peter Salama, the executive director of universal health coverage at the WHO, told the conference that the organisation is working on creating partnerships with financial institutions to drum up the investment needed.
He called health workers a “new generation of knowledge workers in the making”.
Salama said that the main reason why some countries are slow to pick up on the spread of an epidemic, such as Ebola, is because of the lack of primary healthcare workers.
“This is one of the best examples of why we need to invest in the health force at rural, decentralised levels,” he said.
HE al-Muraikhi: said that Qatar is first among Arab countries in supporting the UN and humanitarian organisations.
