MSF Logo/ Photo@ MSF

The medical charity, Medicines Sans Frontier  is calling on the British government and other donors to urgently reinstate funding to South Sudan.

The health charity made the appeal after millions of sterling pounds in support to the national healthcare system was recently withdrawn in a major funding cut by the UK government.

The funding cuts to the Health Pooled Fund, comes in just a few months after the UK announced what it described as a ‘new approach to ending preventable deaths of mothers, babies and children by 2030’ to support “strong health systems”.

The Pool is the largest donor-financing mechanism for healthcare in South Sudan.

The funding provides access to basic primary healthcare and some secondary healthcare including payments for local healthcare workers, drugs and medical supplies, as well as technical assistance.

MSF Head of Mission for South Sudan Federica Franco explained what the cuts mean to the provision of health services in South Sudan.

“Like many other humanitarian organizations working in South Sudan, MSF is already over-stretched and struggling to meet the health needs of the communities that we are serving now. Communities that are affected by so many compounded crises at the same time,” said Mrs. Federica Franco.

It’s not clear why the UK government decided to pull out the funding.

However, Federica urges the UK government and donors to assist South Sudan, to avoid what he terms a life or death implications for women, men and children in the country.

“MSF has very little capacity to scale up to meet the large gap left by the HPF funding cuts, but MSF is urging the UK government and other donors to reprioritize assistance for South Sudan and step in with additional funding to mitigate this decision,” she stated.

As of April 1^st, 2022, the pool had its budget slashed by a projected 24 percent for this fiscal year due to the recent drastic cuts to the UK’s Official Development Assistance.

This has resulted in the immediate suspension of funding to approximately 220 of the 797 public health facilities in eight out of ten states in the country.

Expected further cuts at the end of July will mean that nine state hospitals will also lose funding.

South Sudan remains one of the countries with the highest rates of maternal mortality in the world, according to reports.

MSF, which is the largest and one of the oldest medical-humanitarian organization working in the country, is alarmed by the scale and timing of these cuts to the national public.

With this, it warns against the foreseeable detrimental impact on people’s access to healthcare, especially for the most vulnerable.

Approximately, two-thirds of South Sudan’s 2,300 health facilities are already non-functional and less than half (44 per cent) of the total population live within five kilometers of a functional health facility.

With floods, displacement, food insecurity and violence remaining significant issues in the country, MSF says these funding cuts come at the worst possible time.

This is as the cuts were made with no transition plan in place for the 220 healthcare facilities, and only four months for hospitals, mitigation and contingency plans have not been established.

In Bentiu, where more than 170,000 internally displaced people currently reside, disease outbreaks, malnutrition and other health issues are widespread.

Despite the vulnerability of the community, Bentiu State Hospital is one of the health facilities that HPF will suspend funding for in July.

This is, it says, if no mitigation measures are identified, the MSF hospital will become the only fully functioning secondary healthcare facility in the entire state.

Mrs. Franco also appeals to the government of South Sudan to increase healthcare funding.

“We also take this opportunity to call on the government of South Sudan to increase the funding for health care to really ensure the provision of uninterrupted medical care will be safeguarded.”

The Aweil State Hospital is yet another health facility the medical charity says will lose funding starting at the end of July.

MSF has been running the hospital’s pediatric and maternity departments since 2008, with adult healthcare services being supported by the health Pool Fund.

It is the only hospital for a population of more than 100,000 in Aweil town and over 1.2 million people in the whole state.