Poverty, malnutrition, high fertility, and poor health underpin many challenges facing African countries today. Under these circumstances, it is not surprising that Africa’s health indicators are worse than that of other regions of the world. Despite the recognition of these important health challenges, an understanding about what must be done to improve the health and wellbeing of Africans remains a largely unfinished agenda in today’s development process. This paper argues that international organizations as moral actors have an obligation to redress underdevelopment and favor human wellbeing and flourishing. The paper further asserts that the human rights framework, although helpful and potentially transformative of the health development thinking, is insufficient. It concludes that the challenges can also be tackled from an ethical dimension by adopting the principles of beneficence and justice, which should be the primary principles guiding international organizations in the field of health in designing and implementing health development policies and programs. This ethically-based deliberative space expands the policy horizon of the existing decision-making arrangements which are predominantly technical and political. Thus, an ethically grounded approach brings values to the surface and enables decision makers to access empirical evidence and bring about what people hold as being important to them, that is, the attainment of wellbeing.

It is a truism that global health inequalities are wide and growing.1 In 2003, the late Director General of the World Health Organization (WHO) Lee Jong-Wook noted:

Although aggregate global health indicators have improved substantially since the middle of the past century, the gross health inequalities highlighted in the Alma-Ata Declaration persist. Indeed, the gaps are widening between the world’s poorest people and those better placed to benefit from economic development and public health progress.

Poverty, malnutrition, high fertility, and poor health encapsulate the challenges facing Africa today. Juxtaposed with other regions of the world, Africa faces more serious health concerns, a heavy burden of diseases, and more severely constrained resources for tackling these problems. Maternal and infant mortality and morbidity remain high. More worrisome is the emergence of new diseases, notably the devastating HIV/AIDS epidemic and the recrudescence of tuberculosis both of which are ravaging Africa. In addition, the steady growth of chronic diseases such as cancer, diabetes and cardiovascular disease is posing new threats. A direct consequence of this is that the indicators for health development in Africa are dismal. About one in six African children die before their fifth birthday, with half of these dying from diseases preventable by vaccines, and one woman dies every two minutes from complications of pregnancy and delivery.

International Relations Journal, Beyond Human Rights, International Organizations, Challenge of Health Development in Africa, Poverty, malnutrition, high fertility, poor health, World Health Organization (WHO).