On World Heath Day (7th April) Save the Children UK is calling on the International Monetary Fund to end policies that prevent African governments from recruiting nurses and doctors.

At a recent conference co-organised by Save the Children, African health officials stressed that IMF spending targets are one of the critical blocks to the improvement of health services in their countries.

Chronic under-investment has led to collapsing health systems, appalling and unsafe working conditions for health professionals, and an unfair distribution of health workers between rich and poor countries.

Jasmine Whitbread, Save the Children UK’s Chief Executive said: “It is shameful that thousands of children across Africa continue to die every day from diarrhoea, malaria and measles. This is primarily because hospitals and clinics suffer from under-investment, migration of doctors and nurses, and crippling restrictions on spending imposed by the IMF. When African professionals got together at the end of last month, one of their biggest demands was that the IMF and other international financial institutions stop preventing finance ministers from increasing vital funding for health systems to pay for salaries, training and wages”.

Dr Abdoulaye Bagnou, Co-ordinator in the Prime Minister’s Office, Niger, told the conference: “In Niger, we have a number of doctors, nurses and midwives who have no job in the health sector. Because of the restrictions imposed by the International Monetary Fund, our government cannot hire these people. It is a waste of resources”. Dr Bagnou continued, “In some areas, we have lost all our experts. We cannot recruit new staff. The World Bank and The IMF control our expenses”.

Health workers trained in Africa continue to migrate to the UK. Since 1998, the UK has saved £65 million in NHS training costs through recruitment of Ghanaian doctors alone. Save the Children is calling on Gordon Brown to pay a fair price in compensation to developing countries, and use his influence with the IMF to ask them to work with country governments to help them spend what is needed on health and education.