Maputo, July 24, 2025 (Lusa) - The Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID) announced on Thursday that it will support the Mozambican health service in primary care for children and women in the southern province of Inhambane.
“In Inhambane, we are working in the area of primary health and child survival issues. We will provide support in primary health care in the health systems (…). It is a project that we are currently working on with the Ministry of Health to implement this year,” AECID director Antón Leis told Lusa.
He was speaking on the sidelines of the Global Forum on Innovation and Action for Immunisation and Child Survival - 2025, which has been taking place since Tuesday in Maputo and ends today.
Citing as an example the Manhiça Health Research Centre in the province of Maputo, southern Mozambique, which has benefited from Spanish support for research activities, Antón Leis praised the country's efforts to combat diseases that particularly affect children and women.
“Global health has made a lot of progress in Mozambique in terms of child survival and reducing the prevalence of major diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis, and this is one of our priorities and we will continue working with Mozambique,” he said, promising closer relations with the Mozambican government.
“Spain and Mozambique have had 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 and academics and civil society organisations, are participating in the forum in Maputo.
The meeting is organised by the Ministries of Health of Mozambique and Sierra Leone and the Government of Spain, with the collaboration of the ‘la Caixa’ and Bill and Melinda Gates foundations and Unicef.
According to the director general of the national health institute, Eduardo Samo Gudo, the forum is discussing scientific solutions to enable the world to reposition itself in the fight to reduce child mortality, including the need for a new political commitment to this cause.
Samo Gudo pointed to a “historic and unprecedented reduction” in child mortality in recent decades worldwide, highlighting that between 1990 and 2023, the number of deaths of children under the age of five fell from around 12.8 million per year to 4.8 million.
Despite these advances, global health organisations have recorded a slowdown in the rate of reduction in mortality in this age group since 2015, pointing to the risk that at least 60 African countries will not achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), according to estimates by the World Health Organisation put forward by the same official.
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