On the Record: G7 2018 and Global Health

With an overarching theme of gender equality at G7 2018 meetings in Whistler, BC and Charlevoix, Quebec, the issues addressed in all recommendations, declarations and commitments were viewed through an historic gender lens. While this perspective alone supported the advancement of women and children’s health and rights, global health programming, including adolescent girls’ health and rights, was a specific focus of G7 nations.

The Charlevoix G7 Summit Communiqué

• To support growth and equal participation that benefits everyone, and ensure our citizens lead healthy and productive lives, we commit to supporting strong, sustainable health systems that promote access to quality and affordable healthcare and to bringing greater attention to mental health.

• We support efforts to promote and protect women’s and adolescents’ health and well-being through evidence-based healthcare and health information.

• We recognize the World Health Organization’s vital role in health emergencies, including through the Contingency Fund for Emergencies and the World Bank’s Pandemic Emergency Financing Facility, and emphasize their need for further development and continued and sustainable financing.

• We recommit to support our 76 partners to strengthen their implementation of the International Health Regulations, including through their development of costed national action plans and the use of diverse sources of financing and multi-stakeholder resources.

• We will prioritize and coordinate our global efforts to fight against antimicrobial resistance, in a “one health” approach.

• We will accelerate our efforts to end tuberculosis, and its resistant forms.

• We reconfirm our resolve to work with partners to eradicate polio and effectively manage the post-polio transition.

• We affirm our support for a successful replenishment of the Global Fund in 2019.

Charlevoix Declaration on Quality Education for Girls, Adolescent Girls and Women in Developing Countries

• We will support actions to improve access to nutritious foods, eliminate female genital mutilation and end child, early and forced marriage. We will promote access to appropriate healthcare and evidenced-based health information to help girls stay in school.

G7 Development Ministers’ Meeting

• Prioritizing integrated, life-cycle, rights-based approaches;
• Promoting and protecting adolescent health and well-being, through evidence-based health care and health information;
• Ensuring that adolescent girls benefit from healthy diets and micronutrients required to support their development;
• Promoting “system-level change, and ensuring that humanitarian action is principled, evidence-based, and empowering, and recognizes that interventions to meet basic needs include access to education, health care for girls, and the prevention and response to gender-based violence.”
• Promoting and piloting integrated approaches that support the rights and needs of adolescent girls across a number of sectors including health and nutrition
• Strengthening women and girls’ access to health care by funding and monitoring the implementation of the full range of internationally-agreed standards of humanitarian health response in crises;
• Using evidence, including disaggregated data, to drive decision-making to improve impact and cost-effectiveness by developing clear metrics early on and measuring progress against milestones on an ongoing basis to help identify the most effective innovations and the remaining gaps; and,
• Increasing the voice of adolescent girls, collaborating across sectors and stakeholders “to confront discrimination and social and institutional barriers that prevent adolescent girls from realizing their rights and inhibit progress across all areas of development.”