African sovereignty

It is Africa's time. It has been for some years, but now it is time to promote and exercise African sovereignty in the field of health.  

African countries are taking significant steps with the clear objective of laying the foundations for building and developing a cross-cutting strategy to reduce natural and health risks across the continent. The COVID experience has served to demonstrate that the degree of development of countries may be relevant in terms of available resources, but it is not decisive when it comes to facing the enormous social, economic and political challenge posed by the pandemic.  

Many experts from 80 countries, who gathered in Marrakech for the 2nd African Conference on Health Risk Reduction, warn that there will be other pandemics as lethal or even more lethal than COVID-19 and that risk prevention must become a reality, some insist that it is essential.

The approach set out in the Marrakech Charter is not limited to medical and health care aspects. The approach extends across the board and gives priority to aspects that have an impact, in one way or another, on people's health, such as water, food safety and the environment. Not forgetting technology, research, industrial advances and the various prevention policies aimed at finding solutions to serious situations such as the latest earthquake in Morocco.

The diplomacy of vaccines, their production, their effectiveness and, above all, their discriminatory distribution according to one's financial capacity, is the trigger that forcefully and convincingly drives Africans to develop their own policies to reduce health risks as much as possible and to be able to assume sufficient hospital and care capacity for the population.  

Morocco's leadership in this initiative goes beyond short-term partisan interests and is combined with the drive shown by other countries in holding climate summits such as the one in Kenya and with the participation in Marrakech of experts from countries such as South Africa and Algeria, whose political relations with Rabat are not the best at the moment.  

The successive interventions at this conference constantly stressed the need for Africans to make decisions in favour of their own interests and with a clear awareness of establishing a sovereignty that allows them to make their own decisions and undertake the necessary projects in each of the fields. From the decarbonisation of economies to care for the environment, desalination plants and other projects to guarantee water, to essential measures to achieve food security and sovereignty. It is about a united and solidary Africa, open to international collaboration.