Africa-Press – Mozambique. The Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID) announced this Thursday that it will support the Mozambican health service in providing primary care to children and women in Mozambique’s southern Inhambane province.
“In Inhambane, we are working on primary health care and child survival issues. We will support primary health care in health systems, a project that we are currently working on with the Ministry of Health to implement this year,” AECID director Antón Leis told Lusa.
Leis was speaking on the sidelines of the Global Forum for Innovation and Action on Immunization and Child Survival 2025, which had been taking place since Tuesday in Maputo and ended yesterday.
Citing as an example the Manhiça Health Research Centre in Maputo province, which has benefited from Spanish support for research activities, Antón Leis praised the country’s efforts in combating diseases that particularly affect children and women.
“Global health has made significant progress in Mozambique in terms of child survival and reducing the prevalence of important diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis. This is a priority, and we will continue working with Mozambique,” he said, promising to strengthen relations with the Mozambican government.
“Spain and Mozambique have a long-standing cooperative relationship, and we are strengthening our cooperation,” he recalled.
More than 300 delegates from 29 countries, including ministers and deputy ministers of health, scientists, academics, and civil society organizations, were participating in the forum in Maputo.
The meeting was organized by the Ministries of Health of Mozambique and Sierra Leone, and by the Government of Spain, with the collaboration of the La Caixa foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and UNICEF.
According to the Director-General of Mozambique’s National Health Institute, Eduardo Samo Gudo, the forum was aimed at discussing scientific solutions so that the world can reposition itself to accelerate the fight against child mortality, including the demand for a new political commitment to this cause.
Samo Gudo noted a “historic and unprecedented reduction” in child mortality worldwide in recent decades, highlighting that, between 1990 and 2023, the number of deaths among children under 5 years of age fell from approximately 12.8 million per year to 4.8 million.
Despite these advances, global health organizations have recorded a slowdown in the rate of mortality reduction in this age group since 2015, highlighting the risk that at least 60 African countries will not reach the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), according to World Health Organization estimates put forward by the same official.
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