World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Dr Tedros made history yesterday by publicly announcing the Memorandum of Understanding between the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) and WHO. This marks a crucial high-level commitment between WHO and IPU and signals important political support for the strategic priorities of WHO in ensuring health lives and promoting well-being for all throughout life.
Ongoing collaboration
This Memorandum has arisen from several years of collaboration between WHO and IPU, largely led by WHO Department of Reproductive Health and Research, through the IPU Advisory Group for Health and various working groups. This collaboration has seen impressive progress towards improving Parliamentarians’ understanding of and advocacy for sexual and reproductive health issues in their own countries – particularly when these have a significant impact on the health of vulnerable groups, namely women, children, and adolescents.
The issues addressed by this collaboration have been many, and have included important work towards ensuring the health and well-being of people living with HIV, as well as HIV prevention strategies, in addition to monitoring legal and policy frameworks in relation to child, early and forced marriage.
In his address to the 139th IPU Assembly, Dr Tedros highlighted the important roles played by parliamentarians in decision-making, enacting legislation, and working to remove barriers for their constituents in enjoying good health and well-being throughout life. In addition, he underlined the ways in which they keep governments accountable, and for approving budgets – crucial for ensuring that countries make progress for people’s health.
“WHO and the IPU share many values and objectives. Our two organizations play key roles in bridging the gap between science and policy. Our shared ambition is to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals.” said Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General
Women, Children and Adolescents
In recognition of the momentum gained by IPU in collaboration with WHO, to work to ensure sexual and reproductive health and rights for all, one of the four themes of the Areas of Cooperation is “Promoting health, especially of vulnerable groups, including women, children and adolescents”.
The other targets include universal health coverage, global health security, and parliamentary capacity building.
Dr Tedros’ speech underlined how each of these four areas is “based on the conviction that health is a human right” but that “unfortunately, not everyone enjoys that right.”
He highlighted the ways that parliamentarians and their parliaments can work to address the major challenges and inequalities facing populations, and in particular the most vulnerable.
In addition, he noted the important work that the IPU is doing to mobilise political support for Universal Health Coverage, commenting, “As I always say, universal health coverage is a political choice”.
This Memorandum of Understanding is an important signal from both IPU and WHO of an ongoing collaboration that will work towards achieving health for all – as well as a hope for worldwide political commitment to Universal Health Coverage.
This was highlighted by Dr Tedros’ closing words: “We are now witnessing unprecedented political commitment for achieving the dream of health of all. We must now work together to turn that commitment into a reality for all. Today, we celebrate this important achievement. Tomorrow, we redouble our efforts to promote health, keep the world safe, and serve the vulnerable.”