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The significant progress in improving people’s health in Africa has been commended by delegates attending the 67th session WHO Regional Committee for Africa, which began today in Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe. This follows the presentation of the 2016-2017 Biennial Report on the Work of WHO in the African Region by Dr Matshidiso Moeti, the WHO Regional Director for Africa. The report highlights progress achieved during the past biennuim in the Region in emergency preparedness and response, elimination of priority diseases including HIV, TB, malaria; tackling non-communicable diseases, progress in protecting children from illness and deaths, among others.

The President of Zimbabwe, H.E Robert Mugabe has called on African governments to prioritise health in their national development agenda. He said the health challenges facing the Region including communicable, maternal and child deaths and non-communicable disease require concerted efforts to tackle them.

The functional review exercise for WHO South Sudan Country office successfully commenced on 24 August, 2017. This six-day exercise is part of the WHO transformation agenda (2015-2020), which the WHO Africa Region has embarked on for all the 47 WHO Country Offices in the Region. South Sudan WHO country office is the 5th to be reviewed among the 18 countries scheduled for this year.

For more than 40 years, the World Health Organization (WHO) has worked to control river blindness (onchocerciasis), the second major infectious cause of blindness in Africa. Today, 30 years after a major donation of medication by Merck & Co, a pharmaceutical company, and after 20 years of the success of the African Program for Onchocerciasis Control (APOC) the reduction of the disease intensity has allowed WHO to shift the goal from control to elimination – a really ambitious achievement.

2017 marks the 5th anniversary of the World Health Organization's roadmap on NTDs, the World Health Assembly resolution on NTDs (WHA66.12) and the London Declaration.