SWRadio Africa
2 February 2011
The Minister of Health and Child Welfare, Dr Henry Madzorera (right), speaks to SW Radio Africa journalist Lance Guma and answers questions sent in by the listeners. He is asked to explain his statement that Zimbabwe should export health care workers to other countries and replies to queries about corruption in the delivery of ARV’s, accusations of misuse of money at the National AIDS Council and what his ministry is doing to retain health care workers in the country? This is an excerpt of the interview.
Interview broadcast 02 February 2011
Lance Guma: Hello Zimbabwe and thank you for joining us on Question Time. Our guest today is the Minister of Health and Child Welfare Dr Henry Madzorera. Thank you for joining us.
Henry Madzorera: Thank you Lance.
Guma: OK now we start off with the editor of the NewZimbabwe.Com website, Mduduzi Mathuthu – he asks the first question and says in his own words – why haven’t you been as successful as David Coltart the Minister of Education in rallying international finance to rebuild the health sector?
Madzorera: Thank you for that very good question. Let me start by saying good evening to Zimbabwe. This question assumes that the minister of Education has been more successful in rallying international finance. I don’t know where they get that from or where the statistics come from but what I want to say is that there’s been a lot of support to the health sector, we’ve achieved a lot and there’s been a lot of international support.
I don’t think there is any ministry which is supported more than Health in this government of national unity. It might be that perhaps we have not shouted too much about it but let me just chronicle a few of the achievements we’ve had. You’ll know that on the HIV front we’ve got a Global Fund supporting Zimbabwe to the tune of several hundred million dollars.
We’ve got other programmes, organisations supported by various governments like the American government, the two CIDAS (Canadian and Swedish aid agencies) and , I’m referring here to the ESP (Expanded Support Programme); EGPAF (Elizabeth Glaser Paediatric AIDS Foundation) is doing a lot on the HIV front as well and they get funds from the American government and so this year alone they have received, I can’t accurately the figure but I think it’s around fifty million dollars to do prevention of mother to child transmission and paediatric Aids programmes and we launched this programme last week and it was in the public arena.
Then we go to the issue of infrastructure, rehabilitation – there has been a lot of support from many organisations, for example USAID helped us to rehabilitate infrastructure at our major central hospitals and some provincial hospitals and we are still getting support from other institutions. There’s been a lot of support in the area of drugs – that is why our drugs supply situation; particularly at primary care clinics have been good. In some instances going up to 90% of requirement.
This has come through other donors again who are working through UNICEF to procure what we have called Primary Care Kits. I could go on and on, we’ve got a lot of work and support going on in terms of health information systems and computerisation of the ministry so that data can flow smoothly from the primary care centre to head office.
We’ve had a lot of support on the cholera front; we continue to have support to manage cholera, to get commodities for preparedness sake; though we don’t have an outbreak going at the moment but for continued preparedness. I cannot finish chronicling the amount of assistance we are getting from partners.
On the human resources front, you know that again we have got a retention scheme going. We are the only ministry that has got a retention scheme for its workers so we do give a top up salary to all the health care workers and it has worked very well for us in terms of retaining health care workers, you won’t find that in Education.
Now I want to emphasise something – I don’t really want to compare what is happening in the ministry of Health with what is happening in Education; our problems are different, our needs are different. Education is doing extremely well I must agree right from the start and I want to congratulate Minister Coltart for the work that is happening in his ministry but to assume that not much is happening in Health would be erroneous as well.