Blogs

"A lot of money was spent for treatment, so the financial pressure increased. If the money could have been saved, we may have eaten better food." Millions of people are pushed into poverty each year due to out-of-pocket (OOP) expenses. How will universal health coverage (UHC) schemes deal with seemingly innocuous health costs for primary care such as medicines, travel, food, and accommodations or lost income due to illness?

One in three people with TB are “missing,” meaning they are either undiagnosed or unreported. That is 3.6 million people whose quality of care — if they received care at all — is simply unknown. In September 2018, heads of state committed to finding and treating all people with TB, including these missing millions, with a goal of diagnosing and treating 40 million people with TB from 2018 to 2022. To find the missing millions with TB, governments, civil society, affected communities, and the private sector must work together with global donors to take 6 actions prescribed by ACTION — as shown in our new TB accountability tool.

This World Food Day, ACTION is reflecting on progress made over the last five years to fill the gap in financing for nutrition by releasing Following the Funding: Nutrition for Growth — Progress Report because now is the time for funders to consider their role in reaching global targets to reduce malnutrition and what it will take to get there.

I grew up in a village where malnutrition was a big issue, where our neighbors did not have enough food and had a big number of children—some of them stunted. The stunted children repeated countless number of classes. Imagine how painful it is to live in a village and have 38 percent of children, which is 2 in 5, stunted, affecting their academic performance and ultimately their productivity in the future.

In the early months of 1993, there was frenetic activity within the Geneva headquartered WHO’s Communicable Diseases program, to get Tuberculosis designated as a Global Emergency. Fast forward 25 years – it is 2018: Tagged the world largest TB burden country, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi has committed to India eliminating TB by 2025; and at last, TB had a special UN High Level Meeting on September 27th. (This op-ed is re-posted from the UN Inter Press on September 28.)

United by a common desire to improve health conditions for people across the globe, ACTION partners came together in Washington, DC, July 13–17, to celebrate its successes and devise strategies to conquer conditions and diseases of poverty like tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, polio, and malnutrition.

The power of civil society to influence positive change is the basis of ACTION’s advocacy. ACTION partners played a crucial role in drafting C20 recommendations on global health at the C20 Summit in Buenos Aires this August.

“We need to learn to treat tuberculosis (TB) as more than just a bacterium," declared Nawina Kachenga, executive director of CITAMplus and a TB survivor living with HIV. "We need to consider all the ways that it impacts families and communities and make sure we not only have the funding for testing, treatment, and care, but that we are taking down the barriers that keep people from accessing it.”