A successful meeting of the UN NCD Task Force has just concluded with Members agreeing to an independent joint evaluation of the Task Force. ‘2023 marks ten years since the UN Secretary-General established the Task Force and now is a perfect time to review its impact’, said Nick Banatvala, Head of the Task Force Secretariat.
Last month the WHO Director-General reminded the
global community during the annual Friends of the Task Force meeting at the UN
General Assembly that, while the Task Force has much to be proud of, there remains
much more to do.
Members of the Task Force discussed preparations for
the next high-level meeting on NCDs, which will be in 2025. ‘The joint
evaluation is a crucial part of these preparations’, Dudley Tarlton from
the UN Development Programme highlighted. ‘We need to be ever more effective
if we are to support governments meeting their 2030 NCD and mental health
targets; 2030 is now only a few years away, we have to be a lot more ambitious’,
he added.
A special session on human rights was held during the
meeting. ‘Human rights framework is
indispensable to how we respond to health challenges such as NCDs and mental
health’ said Lynn Gentile from the UN
Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. Task Force
members welcomed recently Task Force briefings to the UN Committee on the
Rights of the Child and the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.
The meeting
also received a report of a Task Force session on promoting health and
wellbeing in an urbanized world during the UN-Habitat General Assembly in the
summer. ‘Our General Assemblies come round only once in four years and
having NCDs highlighted is important in moving our collective work forward’,
said UN-Habitat’s Graham Alabaster. ‘It is cities and town where the battle
for NCDs will be won or lost’, he added, echoing the words of Maimunah Mohd
Sharif, UN Habitat’s Executive Director, when she spoke at the last month’s UN
General Assembly.
Tobacco
was a key theme of the meeting, with Task Force members agreeing their plans
for ensuring successful conference and meeting of Parties on the Tobacco
Control Framework Convention in Panama at next month’s COP 10 and MOP 3 events. As part of this, UNDP and the Convention
Secretariat are finalising a set of briefs that will provide policy and
decision makers across government with information on how tobacco control
impacts their sector, and the steps they can take to respond to the challenges
while at the same time advancing their own objectives and accountabilities.
The meeting also agreed plans to finalise the global business case for investing in digital health.
The meeting included over
20 agencies and was hosted in Vienna by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
A summary of the meeting with actions
agreed will be published shortly.