EU's upcoming global health strategy: fully include persons with disabilities!



EU's upcoming global health strategy: fully include persons with disabilities!

The European Union is currently revising its strategy on global health. The strategy’s aims are to improve health systems and prevent and respond to global health threats as well as tackle all infectious and non-communicable diseases. The strategy will also address inequalities and advance towards universal health coverage.

EDF welcomes this as an important opportunity to include the rights of persons with disabilities in the revised strategy, as it was not the case with the previous strategy.

EDF and International Disability and Development Consortium (IDDC) submitted a joint position paper to the European Commission’s call for evidence regarding the Strategy. We see this revision as an important opportunity to ensure that the new strategy, and any related actions are aligned with CRPD obligations as well as with global commitment to leave no one behind in the implementation of the 2030 Agenda, the related SDGs, the commitments the EU made at the Global Disability Summit and the World Health Assembly Resolution on the highest attainable standard of health for persons with disabilities.

We call on the EU to mainstream disability inclusion across all their priority areas, including:

  1. Fully integrate disability inclusion within strategies aimed at the achievement of the health-related SDGs, and in particular Universal Health Coverage (UHC).
  2. Strengthen inclusive health systems that provide access to general health care and specialised services and programmes related to disability-specific health requirements, across the spectrum of care and throughout the life course.
  3. Ensure that it makes health equity and the inclusion of persons with disabilities an integral part of health emergency preparedness and response.
  4. Create One Health interventions and solutions which are inclusive and supporting environments for all.
  5. Engage civil society, in particular organisations of persons with disabilities (OPDs), in health-related policy design, planning, implementation, monitoring and evaluation.
  6. Ensure that all EU delegations are inclusive of and accessible to all persons with disabilities and include civil society and in particular OPDs in its dialogues with governments of partner countries.
  7. Optimise the use of data on disability inclusion to inform health policies and investments.
  8. Implement the OECD DAC disability policy marker to track development finance in support of persons with disabilities, including for health finance and investments.
  9. Champion the rights of persons with disabilities in its multilateral, bilateral and regional cooperation and partnerships, and to ensure better coordination and joint approaches to act on commitments already made at the global and regional levels.

We look forward to reading the first draft to be ready by 17th November 2022.

Read the position paper on the new EU global health strategy


Contact

For more information, please contact An-Sofie Leenknecht, EDF Human Rights Coordinator
(Ansofie.Leenknecht@edf-feph.org)