Prof Justice Novignon and Prof. John Ataguba join AU’s ALM tracker subcommittee

The African Union Commission in moving forward with the African Leadership Meeting (ALM) Declaration invited AfHEA to join the sub-committee on tracker in February 2020. The Tracker sub-committee was identified as an important source of expertise for the ALM Declaration implementation. The AfHEA representatives on the Tracker sub-committee are Prof. Justice Nonvignon, an Associate Professor at the School of Public Health, University of Ghana and Prof John Ataguba an Associate Professor and Director of the Health Economics Unit, University of Cape Town.

The main objective of the subcommittee on tracker is to compliment the Africa Scorecard on Domestic Financing for Health and enable Member States to track, step-by-step progress, towards increased domestic financing and its efficient and effective allocation, pooling, and use.

Overall, the Tracker sub-committee is essentially developing a Tracker that will track (annually) financing flows and guide countries in investing in health. A draft health financing Tracker is currently being finalized and will be reviewed by AU ministers of health and finance later in 2020. The reviewed draft will then be discussed and adopted early next year (2021) by the African Union Heads of State. To ensure efficient and effective delivery of the sub-committee’s Terms of Reference, members of the sub-committee discussed and agreed to divide the committee into four (4) smaller sub-groups. The AfHEA representative is the chairperson for group 1, which focuses on leadership, governance and coherence. The tracker sub-committee has had several meetings since April 2020. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the mode of meetings of the committee and the smaller groups have been virtual.

Prof John Ataguba
Prof. Justice Nonvignon