What is 15 by 2015?

“15by2015” quality health care for all

Primary health care and prevention are the best and most affordable ways to save the most lives and improve overall health.

With the “15by2015” campaign we ask that donor organizations allocate 15% of their vertical funding towards sustainable comprehensive primary health care that is accessible and affordable in all regions of the world.

Quality health care for all

The eight millennium development goals form a blueprint, agreed upon by all of the countries and leading developmental organizations worldwide, for making unprecedented efforts to meet the needs of the world’s poorest by the target date of 2015. Improvement of health, and thereby improvement of health care, is one of the objectives of these eight goals.

With the campaign “15by2015” we want to specifically target health care and make you and all influencing stakeholders aware of an adequate strategy to improve health care. Quality health care–accessible and affordable–is a right for all; most everybody agrees on this, but the way to reach this is not always clear.

The present situation of health care aid

The positive news is that financial support in developing countries has dramatically increased in the last years, nearly 26% between 1997 and 2002 (from US$6.4 billion to US$8.1 billion). However, the vast majority of this aid was allocated to disease-specific projects (vertical programs) rather than to broad-based investments (horizontal programs) such as primary health care services. Vertical programs improve health care, but only for small groups of people with specific diseases. Some people receive good care; others remain untreated because there are no doctors, nurses, or medication available.

Furthermore, salaries of health care providers working for donor-funded vertical programs are often two-to-four times that of equally trained government workers in primary health care. This induces an internal “brain-drain” (loss of well-trained people where they are most needed) where local health care workers move from their work in health centers and hospitals, to the better-paid projects of donor organizations.

What is “15by2015”?

“15 by 2015” is a campaign calling for all major global health donors to allocate 15% of their giving towards strengthening of the primary health care system of the country/ies that they choose to support. The target date is the same as that of the globally-known eight millennium development goals, 2015.

Why “15by2015”?

Primary health care cuts across diseases in a systemic way. Improved quality primary health care (infrastructure, human resources and equipment) should be accessible and affordable for all, and as such, represents an opportuntiy for broad-based and sustainable investment. If good primary health care were available in the 42 countries accounting for about 90% of child deaths worldwide, 63% of these deaths could be prevented. The most prevalent health care problems in developing countries are respiratory illnesses, diarrhoea and complications of labor and delivery. These can and must be treated within the same primary health care framework that focuses on such diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis and AIDS.

Please sign our petition in support of improving the primary health care around the world.

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