Director health promotion calls for health in sectoral policies

Modou Njie, the director of health promotion has over the weekend emphasized that all sectors should consider health in their implementation of policies and strategies.

Njie who was speaking in a two days sectoral policy review for implementation of health in all policies at Nana, said if the sectors are developing their policies or strategies, they want them to talk about health.

"We had the first engagement in 2015, where we brought about technicians, politicians and other decision makers to brief them of the outcome of the helfin declaration on health policies in 2013, focusing on health in all policies," Njie stated.

He further indicated that the whole idea is for every sector to ensure that they talk about health, put health in their policies and allocate for adequate among of funds to the health sector. He added that with that they can go above the Abuja 15% declaration of budget allocation for the health sector.

"We want to inform other sectors that whatever they do with their budget, will have huge impact to the health and distribution of health in the country," he said.

Momodou Gassama, the representative of World Health Organisation (WHO) has dealt on the importance of the review, while stating that is to chat the way for better health in the country for the present and future generation.

He added that health is very fundamental in whatever we do in our development agenda, however emphasized that no development can take place without health.

"Health is beyond health because whatever we do will impact on health, whether directly or indirectly."

He examined that the health sector will change it gears in term of mobilizing the necessary resources, strategies and capacities to champion health in all other sectors, in order to reinforce what they are doing.

Alpha Bah, representative of the Ministry of Basic and Secondary Education has also explained that if they look at the composition of the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG), we will realized that in each sector, one cross cutting issue is health.

"In our policy, we have the school health, which we talk about health facilities and health service delivery related to our school system," he clarified.