Ebola has focused the world’s attention on the challenges of health care in Africa. The continent has 11% of the world’s population but 25% of the world’s disease burden. It also has just 1.3% of the global health workforce.
Yet African health leaders have shown enormous creativity, innovation and leadership in tackling global health challenges.
University of Melbourne Professor of Public Health Rob Moodie spoke with Lord Nigel Crisp about his new book – African Health Leaders: Making Change and Claiming the Future – and the lessons Australia and the world can learn from African health leaders.
Nigel Crisp is an independent crossbench member of the House of Lords, where he co-chairs the All Party Parliamentary Group on Global Health. Lord Crisp was chief executive of the National Health Service in England and permanent secretary of the UK Department of Health between 2000 and 2006.
Speaking with: Nigel Crisp.
Rob Moodie: If I could start out by setting the scene from your latest book, African Health Leaders: Making Change and Reclaiming the Future. In it, your co-editor, Ugandan doctor Francis Omaswa, writes that over the past 30 to 40 years, the relationship between donors and African countries has been pretty mixed. As he says, donors have helped improve things but it’s been done at a price.
He talks about a loss of core values, the loss of self-respect, self-confidence and self-determination. What do you think has gone wrong?
Nigel Crisp: Well, I think there was a certain inevitability about it. The quotation he uses is:
we went begging for help and we got it in return for some of our core values.
I suppose they were in the position of being weak in terms of their negotiating position, they were looking for help, and I suppose we came in from the west (and I associate the UK and the US and Australia and elsewhere) and tried to do our best.
You'll know that very often you can come into a country and you can think you know the solutions because actually you’ve seen something similar in your own country. What, of course, you often forget and it takes you some time to remember and recognise, is that there are big cultural issues about how you do things and it’s not just as simple as applying our knowledge in another country.
