The African Union and European Union are celebrating 25 years of the Partnership, with the 7th EU-AU Summit taking place on 24-25 November 2025 in Luanda, Angola. This Summit offers a key opportunity to revise the Partnership’s health pillar and to update commitments previously made under the 2022 Joint Vision for 2030. The Preliminary Monitoring Report of the Joint Vision published alongside the Ministerial of May 2025 reveals uneven progress and several outdated commitments, as they were adopted during the Covid-19 pandemic. While health will feature in Summit discussions, it risks being overshadowed by other political priorities. Incorporating the perspective of African civil society organisations will be crucial to ensure updated, fit for purpose commitments and priorities.
To support this process, Global Health Advocates (GHA) conducted interviews with five long-standing African civil society organisations (CSOs): ASAPSU (Ivory Coast), CITAM Plus (Zambia), HDT (Tanzania), KANCO (Kenya), and WACI Health (multi-regional), to provide crucial insight into the lived realities of health reform and the implications of global shifts for local systems. Collectively, they highlight three core priorities:
- Reform must not mean retreat: The 7th EU-AU Summit presents an unmissable opportunity to uphold principles of international solidarity. As LMICs face devastating disruptions, and discussions are ongoing on reforming the current system, CSOs highlight that the need for targeted, flexible ODA remains essential in the short to medium term, while countries build the fiscal capacity for domestic health investments.
- Sustainable Financing: Enhancing domestic resource mobilisation (DRM), including measures such as sumptuary or sugar-sweetened beverage taxes, strengthened tax systems and strategic engagement with the private sector, can enable countries to progressively reduce external dependency while maintaining critical health services. Additionally, framing health investments as economic social imperatives and addressing the debt burden in African public expenditure at the expense of healthcare will support greater fiscal space for health. This will also strengthen countries’ capacities to sustainably invest in their own health systems.
- Prevention and equity must guide reform: As the world faces unprecedented challenges, an overreliance on curative models is leaving millions without access to essential preventive care. Countries, with the support of regional and global institutions, must do more by investing in primary health care (PHC), prevention, and Universal Health Coverage (UHC) to build greater resilience, and equity.
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