Honourable Secretary of Health Dr Janette Loreto-Garin;
Your Excellency Ambassador Jae-Shin Kim;
Resident Representative of KOICA to the Philippines, Mr Song Minhyeon;
Honourable Mayor of Davao City Rodrigo Duterte;
Regional Director for the Department of Health Dr Abdullah Dumama Jr;
Honourable governors and mayors;
Doctors, ladies and gentlemen:
Good morning and thank you for joining us today to launch this project to improve the health of mothers and children in Davao.
When I visited here in 2012 to meet with health officials, we discussed efforts to help local governments provide quality maternal and newborn health services.
Specifically, we talked about ways in which a global body such as the World Health Organization could work with the Department of Health to provide support at the subnational level.
Those conversations were the start of the exciting initiative we are launching here today — which opens the road for increased WHO support to help Member States address at the subnational level.
In a Region as diverse as ours, we have embraced many innovative approaches in order to tailor our support to Member State needs.
Within larger and more decentralized Member States, technical support often must be adapted to different areas within countries.
For this reason, we began engaging more closely at the subnational level.
China and the Philippines are the first two countries in the Region where we have been implementing comprehensive subnational support.
As you know, WHO has had a long and special relationship with the Philippines, as the home of the Regional Office for more than 60 years.
Throughout the years, we have been a constant collaborator with the Department of Health — working together for the health and well-being of Filipinos, especially mothers and children.
We started working with the Department of Health in this region to support the Municipality of Malita in Davao Occidental Province.
We focused on strengthening local planning, budgeting, monitoring and evaluation to improve access to quality primary care services.
This initiative supports the health stewardship role of the local chief executive, the local health board and the Department of Health — which works to provide technical assistance and support to local government units responsible for service delivery.
We called this the Sub-National Initiative, or SNI — "Accelerating Convergence Efforts through Systems Strengthening for Maternal and Newborn Health".
The initiative attracted the support of the Korean Government as a sustainable way to support improved maternal and newborn health outcomes. Through the Korean development programme — or KOICA — three million dollars will be invested over the next three years.
Over that time, the initiative we are launching here today will be scaled up to include nine more municipalities in four provinces across this region.
We all thank KOICA and the Korean people for their generosity.
We also appreciate the hard work and leadership of the Department of Health and those in the Malita Municipality.
As this partnership develops, we will collect evidence and lessons learnt so that this successful model can be implemented in communities across the Philippines.
In doing so, we will support the Department of Health in its mission to ensure — Pangkalahatang Kalusugan— or universal health coverage for all Filipinos.
In closing, I want to say that it gives me great pleasure to see ideas we discussed only a few years ago now turning into reality and improving the health of the people in this region.
Again, I thank you for your hospitality — and I look forward to returning to Davao in the coming years to see these efforts flourishing.