Oyibo Patrick Gold^1,, Ejughemre Ufuoma John²

Sub-Saharan Africa is lagging behind in achieving the United Nations Millennium development goals particularly those which are directly health related. Although there have been some level of commitments with improvements on many fronts; however, the divide still remains in the region where the issues of high child and maternal mortality, under nutrition, human rights violation and overall weak health systems still continue to pervade. This bothers on the poor state of health of many of its citizens which is further exacerbated by the harrowing conditions of health care delivery and the health systems in general. While the region lags behind, this doesn’t give the overall global reflections as there have been tremendous achievements in health and health care. Significant strides in epidemiology, population health and health systems have addressed most of the challenges of communicable diseases and these matched with technological inputs have met the basic health needs of humans and accelerated health care delivery. More so, scientific breakthrough in agriculture has also helped to tackle the challenges of hunger and under nutrition globally. These trends in a nut shell have improved on the health and overall developmental indices of humans globally. However, sub-Saharan Africa needs to be at par with the rest of the World if the MDGs are anything to go by. It is these that necessitate the need for an accelerated empowerment to strengthen the existing weak health systems in the region.

accelerating, Sub-Saharan Africa, health systems, strengthening