By Belinda Nketia
President John Dramani Mahama, on August 5, 2025, unveiled a three-tier plan for global, regional, and national action to transform health governance, scale African solutions, and strengthen self-reliance during the Africa Health Sovereignty Summit held in Accra.
The summit was attended by African heads of state, policymakers, and global health stakeholders, including the Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO), Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
At the global level, President Mahama called for a new health governance architecture that is democratic, just, and suited to a multipolar, digitally interconnected, and climate-challenged world. “Health governance must be fit for 21st-century realities,” he said.
At the regional level, he urged Africa to scale up homegrown solutions, including the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, the African Medicines Agency, the African Continental Free Trade Area’s health corridors, and AUDA-NEPAD’s resilience agenda.
At the national level, President Mahama said countries must move beyond plans to execution, backed by political will, domestic resource mobilisation, and what World Health Organization Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has called “effective leadership.”
President Mahama urged the heads of state present at the summit to make health central to their economic strategies and to see it as a driver of productivity and growth rather than a cost to be contained.
“We must see health as a capital investment,” he said. “And we must urge our ministers of finance and our economists to embed it in national accounts as a productivity multiplier, not a consumption expense.”
