G20 Acknowledges India's Leadership on Global Concerns, Supports Views of India on Array of Issues, Says Piyush Goyal

G-20 Acknowledges India’s Leadership on Global Concerns, Supports Views of India on Array of Issues, said Union Minister Piyush Goyal.

G20 needs to help increase fund availability to the World Health Organization (WHO), besides supporting ongoing multi-stakeholder mechanisms such as GAVI, CEPI, ACT-A with a specific focus on equitable and affordable access, Union Health Minister Mansukh Mandaviya said on Friday. He said this while addressing the G20 Joint Finance and Health Ministers’ meeting through video-conferencing.

The agenda of the discussion was “concrete proposals to strengthen global health financing governance”, according to a statement issued by the health ministry. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought to the fore the importance of international health regulations and the need for strengthening global health governance, the minister said in his address.

Presently, several parallel proposals are being discussed in multiple forums, including the IPPPR’s Global Health Threats Council, an IHR review, the need for a framework, a convention or any other instrument on pandemic management and the G20 proposal of Joint Health and Financing Task Force to strengthen pandemic preparedness and response, he added. “While supporting the present proposal for Joint Health and Financing Task Force, India proposes that the centrality of the WHO needs to be maintained in the health arena,” Mandaviya said.

India also proposes that while multiple entities with overlapping mandates are delving on the issue of pandemic preparedness and response, a clearly defined complementarity of all such initiatives being seamlessly woven to create a global health emergency management architecture is the need of the hour. There is also a need to synchronise these multilateral initiatives amongst the member states in accordance with their local context at the national level, the minister said.

“G20 needs to aid in increasing available funds to WHO, primarily funds which are not ear-marked, besides supporting ongoing multi-stakeholder mechanisms such as GAVI, CEPI, ACT-A with a specific focus on equitable and affordable access. “In a pandemic, no one is safe until everyone is safe. In this context, I quote our Prime Minister Narendra Modiji when he mentioned that ‘everyone’s support, everyone’s development, everyone’s trust and everyone’s efforts’ are vital for success,” he added.

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