06 Maria Paola Chiesi

Good morning everybody, your eminence and your colleagues Jeff. Thank you for having me here today. It's so good to have the chance to see you all in person after two painful years of isolation. So, discussing the linking between poverty and biophysical factors, of course it's not easy to identify which one of the two components is the determinant of the other. The physical factors that have an influence on our survival, development, and evolution, such as soil, water, air, or good health conditions, are the same as those that influence wealth conditions. So in my few words today, I would like to focus particularly on health and access to health care, which is my background and my experience.

So poverty is both a cause and a consequence of poor health, as we all know. It increases the chances of poor health, and poor health in turn traps communities in poverty. Infectious disease and neglected tropical diseases kill and weaken millions of the poorest and most vulnerable people each year, as we all know. And of course, the COVID-19 crisis has reminded us that our economies depend on our health, and our health depends on how we work together. The COVID pandemic led to 97 million more people being in poverty in 2020. It represents a historical, unprecedented increase in recent times. While we are all still involved in the challenge of reaching a COVID-free world, we should acknowledge that despite major health gains of the past decades, new threats are emerging, including the resurgence of all the new diseases, the risk of new and future pandemics, and increasing global burden of non-communicable diseases. In fact, the latter account for over 70 percent of all deaths in the age group 30 to 70. According to the World Bank, more than 800 million people globally spend at least 10 percent of their household income on health care, and half of the world's population lacks access to essential health services. And 100 million people are driven into poverty each year by the cost of health care. So at the current pace, up to one third of the world's population will remain underserved by 2030, with no access to basic healthcare. And so we absolutely need to act on these in order to reach the health-related targets of the SDGs by 2030, and universal health coverage is the only way forward.

And this is what was recognized at the 2019 United Nations high-level meeting on universal health coverage. But as a global community, we are not really on track to meet this goal. Surely proper funding is needed, but it's not sufficient. As I personally experience with the Chiesi Foundation in sub-Saharan Africa, we work particularly in Burkina Faso, Togo, Benin, and Burundi, and partially also in Central Africa. Low-income countries need, yes, financial but also technical and political and managerial support to strengthen local healthcare systems, particularly primary healthcare, to educate and train healthcare workers, establish some regulatory systems and streamline supply chain, eliminate waste and inefficiencies and corruption. And unfortunately, when it comes to global health, the political debate is often limited to the thought about affordability, price of medicinal products, and IP protection. But it's much more than this, and we must employ a holistic approach based on partnership, where all the actors of the healthcare system, from institutions to governments, from the civil society to NGOs, from healthcare professionals and patients advocacy groups to industry, should be involved. So to put it simply, health is wealth. If we invest in disease prevention, immunization, basic health care, we can save a lot in healthcare costs and working days, and we can save lives and generate broader society benefits. So to conclude, universal health coverage should therefore be a priority, together with climate change fight, in the international agenda. Thank you.