President John Dramani Mahama, the African Union Champion for African Financial Institutions, has launched “The Accra Reset: Reimagining Global Governance for Health and Development” in New York, United States.
The launch took place when the President hosted a landmark high-level event on the margins of the 80th Session of the ongoing United Nations General Assembly (UNGA80) in New York, United States.
This pivotal initiative will introduce a bold and actionable framework designed to fundamentally transform the global governance architecture, ensuring it is fit-for-purpose in a turbulent, post-SDG era.
President Mahama in his keynote address said as African Union Champion for African Financial Institutions, he carries a mandate to help shape the future of the African continent’s financial architecture.
“As a continent’s advocate for reparations, I’m also deeply aware of the failings of the world’s moral order. That responsibility is also why I’m passionate about the Accra Reset,” he said.
He added: “For I know that without new governance, business, and financing models for development, there can be no sustainable path for health, no resilience for economies, and no workable future for global solidarity.”
He noted that the Accra Summit produced a resounding consensus.
“The health crisis we face is not only a crisis of disease, vaccines, and hospitals, but also a crisis of social and economic inequality. It is a symptom of a deeper malaise in the global development architecture itself,” he said.
President Mahama said the collapse of the legacy aid system, punishing debt burdens in the global south, and fragmented supply chains were not isolated problems.
He said the evidence that the very logic of global development as they had known it was no longer fit for purpose.
“From Accra, a message went out to the world. If we are to heal our health systems, we must first reset development itself,” he stated.
He said the New York meeting was taking place at a time of increasing global uncertainty; adding that humanity had made progress once unimaginable.
He said in 1990, 36 per cent of the world lived in extreme poverty, and by 2019, that figure had fallen to eight per cent, and that global life expectancy had risen by nearly a decade in just one generation.
The President said maternal mortality had declined by a third since the year 2000, and in global health since 2000 alone, more than 50 million lives had been saved through expanded access to vaccines, HIV treatment, and malaria prevention.
He said the Global Fund and Gavi, born out of a new development consensus two decades ago, had provided life-saving tools to billions of the world’s population.
“This progress deserves recognition. It reminds us of what becomes possible when global solidarity rises to meet global challenges. And yet, even as we celebrate these gains, the cracks in the global order are growing deeper,” he said.
He added that, “The question that agitates our mind is:
how do we sustain these gains in the face of current global shifts?”
President Mahama said the COVID-19 pandemic erased two decades of poverty reduction in less than two years; adding that climate change had driven nearly 735 million people back into chronic hunger and almost one in 10 of the world’s population was facing chronic hunger.
The Accra Reset was anchored on three fundamental shifts – the first was a mindset shift, which was needed, recognising that they live in an era of unpredictability, President Mahama said, warning that the post-war multilateral era was being ripped apart and that it appears they must prepare for a period of global turbulence.
The President said the second was a focus shift moving from beyond crafting new lists of global goals to building executable business models for coalitions, syndicates, and platforms that deliver.
And the third was a reality shift, accepting that diverse, even contradictory, interests are now a permanent feature of our system; and turning these very tensions into the fuel for pragmatic cooperation and mutual investment is imperative.
President Mahama said this new model demands resource multiplication and not rationing.
“Instead of limiting resilience, let us multiply it. Instead of setting new spending targets, let us measure the additional value that health, climate resilience, and food security can contribute to the global economy,” he said.
The President added that, “To give this Reset shape, we must launch a new global coalition, a partnership of the willing, the beginnings of a durable club, a presidential council comprising heads of state and government from Africa, Asia, Latin America, and beyond, which will provide political leadership to this movement.”
Also, a high-level panel drawing from health, finance, innovation, and business would provide intellectual depth and evidence to this exercise.
This coalition, he said, together would apply the operating logic of the Reset to help the world rethink global development itself.
