Mainstreaming health equity in the development agenda of African countries

Abstract

Equity is emerging as an urgent policy priority in health sector reforms in many African countries. This is due in part to recent assessments of progress towards the targets of the United Nations Millennium evelopment Goals (MDGs) directly related to health, which suggest that progress will remain slow in the absence of explicit policies and rogrammes that are driven by and that promote health equity. The health MDGs – on infant mortality, maternal mortality, and HIV/AIDS – focus on health inequalities. But as O’Donnell et al (2008) argue, these health inequalities in most cases reflect differences in constraints – lower incomes, poor education, poor housing – than they reflect differences in preferences and should therefore be seen not as inequalities but as inequities insofar as policy can help attenuate them.