The Heart of Universal Health

Across the world, 3.7 billion people lack access to affordable health care, and those who live in vulnerable and remote areas continue to bear the burden of preventable disease and death. The United Nations recently renewed its commitment to achieving universal health coverage, but any plan to secure health access for all people will need to prioritize hard-to-reach populations. Strong community-health programs are poised to serve those populations. In September, the Institute’s Aspen Management Partnership for Health partnered with several organizations—including Amref Health Africa, Financing Alliance for Health, the International Rescue Committee, Last Mile Health, Living Goods, and the Rockefeller Foundation—to launch Communities at the Heart of Universal Health Coverage. The campaign is a yearlong global effort to generate the political will to ensure that universal strategies incorporate financially sustainable, government-owned, high quality community-health programs. AMP Health’s Uzoamaka Osikhena spoke at the campaign’s launch and highlighted the important work of the many national ministries of health across the globe that AMP Health supports. For example, community-health teams in Malawi, Sierra Leone, and Zambia are building indicators into their national health strategies to get care to the hardest-to-reach individuals. The campaign will culminate at the United Nations in a meeting on universal health coverage in 2019.