Publications

Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 3 – ensuring health and well-being for all at all ages – is critical to achieving progress on the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Because health is an integral part of human capital and a precondition, driver and outcome of sustainable development, SDG 3 is linked to around 50 health-related targets across the SDGs and the pledge to leave no one behind. The overall objective of the Global Action Plan is to enhance collaboration among 12 global organizations engaged in health, development and humanitarian responses to accelerate country progress on the health-related SDG targets. The Plan presents a new approach to strengthening collaboration among and joint action by the organizations, building on an initial joint commitment made in October 2018. The Plan is primarily intended to be strategic but provides some operational detail to guide implementation while also allowing flexibility for adjustment based on regular reviews of progress and learning from experience.

This report complements the evaluations of hepatitis responses conducted by fellow stakeholders. One particular inspiration was the WHO’s recent development of country response profiles through a survey on a checklist of indicators of structure (e.g., policy decisions), input (e.g., budget allocation) and process (e.g., implementation of WHO guidelines). To complement the WHO’s top-down macro-level overview of HCV responses, the Coalition PLUS survey provides a bottom-up micro-level evaluation of the HCV response at selected sites in five middleincome countries: India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Morocco, and Thailand. As an explanatory and qualitative survey, the findings and recommendations serve to inform the response in the countries involved in the study.

Asia-Pacific is the most disaster-prone region in the world and home to a number of long-running conflicts. The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) places women and girls at the centre of humanitarian response. This publication shares examples of how we support actions to better mitigate the risks of disasters and support humanitarian response work that is underpinned by UNFPA’s unique mandate encompassing sexual and reproductive health, gender equality, population data and youth empowerment.

In line with UNDP’s ‘Strategic Plan 2018–2021’ and ‘HIV, Health and Development Strategy 2016–2021: Connecting the Dots’, UNDP contributes to UHC. This UNDP Issue Brief on ‘Universal Health Coverage for Sustainable Development’ outlines UNDP’s contributions toward supporting countries to remove barriers to health and improve the affordability, accessibility and quality of health care and systems.  

States have a moral and legal obligation—under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, human rights treaties, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and other international obligations—to remove discriminatory laws and to enact laws that protect people from discrimination.

Microbes do not stop at national borders, so an infectious disease threat anywhere is a threat everywhere. Making our world safer from epidemics means strengthening the capacity of countries to prevent, detect and respond effectively to current and emerging health threats.

Robust health systems are not only essential to ending HIV, TB and malaria as epidemics, they yield broader health outcomes, delivering health services in a sustainable, equitable and effective way. Resilient and sustainable systems for health are necessary for accelerating progress toward universal health coverage, and help countries prepare for emerging threats to global health security.

India is a strategic partner of the Global Fund, both as an implementer and a donor. The government of India has shown great leadership in improving the health needs of its citizens and fighting infectious diseases, especially tuberculosis. India has ambitious goals for all three diseases, including ending TB by 2025 – five years ahead of the Sustainable Development Goals. Since 2002, the Global Fund has disbursed US$2.1 billion in programs to fight HIV, TB and malaria and strengthen health systems in India.

The Global Fund is partnering with governments, medical experts, advocates, civil society and communities affected by HIV, TB and malaria to fight the three diseases and build resilient and sustainable systems for health. As of May 2019, the Global Fund partnership has invested a total of US$366 million in 14 island countries in the Pacific region.

Drug-resistant TB is part of the growing challenge of antimicrobial-resistant superbugs that do not respond to existing medications, resulting in fewer treatment options and increasing mortality rates for illnesses that would ordinarily be curable – including TB. Global development partners must move faster to contain this threat of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) before it escalates to claim millions of lives around the world.