Rescuing Africa’s poor health sector

What you need to know:

Right into the midst of that debate on how to improve Africa’s ailing health sector, jumps this new book titled African Health Leaders: Making Change and Claiming The Future.

If you care to find out, you will discover that the health sector of sub-Saharan Africa is ranked the worst-off of all health sectors anywhere in the world –with people in sub-Saharan Africa ranked with the worst health on average.

And if you care to pursue the issue further, you will also discover that over the last few years, a big debate has blazed around the world on ownership and accountability for health outcomes of populations in Africa.

Right into the midst of that debate on how to improve Africa’s ailing health sector, jumps this new book titled African Health Leaders: Making Change and Claiming The Future.

Published only last month and written by 23 African Health leaders, with veteran health sector leaders Francis Omaswa and Nigel Crisp as editors, it is a book that you might not want to miss if ‘how to rescue Africa’s ailing health sector’ is something you care about.

As the title openly declares, the book’s primary argument is that the liberation of Africa’s ailing health sector is a task that ought to be spearheaded and sustained by African health leaders, not foreigners. Here, the book clarifies that foreigners on their part also ought to allow Africans fix their own health problems, while yet not totally pulling out but playing a supporting role.

To illustrate that its suggestions are not mere daydreams, the book highlights several success stories where African health workers have triumphantly addressed health crises on the continent, all the while stressing that what is needed is work to make such successes the predominant feature of the continent’s health terrain. The very people who oversaw the successes are the ones who narrate these stories.

With the success stories presented to provide examples, Omaswa and Crisp (in their editorial comments which run all through the book) make most of the postulations about the way forward. And what convincing suggestions these veteran global health leaders make indeed!

Omaswa and Crisp also call upon all African citizens to get involved in the health sector and to own the outcomes of our health programmes. Particularly, they are called upon to hold their governments and all other sorts of health leaders accountable so that they play their roles to the community – or else, the editors reckon, they will always be ravaged by health crises like the ongoing Ebola outbreak in West Africa.

As one completes the 340 page book, one feels they cannot agree more with the editor’s assertion in the early pages that there is a lot of good going on in Africa, which unfortunately never gets reported. One also comes out sure that the future is bright for the continent’s health sector if only Africans own their own challenges and their partners let them do so.

NARRATION
For the reader who is worried that the book might actually prove hard to read because of its heavy subject matter and its many ‘medical doctor’ writers, there is pleasantly no need for worry.

The plain language of the book, kept far below the complex world that is medical jargon, couples with the fact that a chunk of the book is in form of narratives by health leaders to make the book as easy to read as a softly-presented biography.

In fact, the sections written by the doctors are the most interesting and easiest to read, because they are more like memoirs. Perhaps here, the editors might be charged with failing to include pictures in order to lighten up the book further.