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Health is central to ending poverty between now and 2030. Good health is a precondition for poverty alleviation, but it is also an indicator and outcome of progress towards that goal. Health is thus an indispensable requirement for sustainable development.

The thousands of people who have been working to design a new set of global goals to pick up from where the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) will be leaving off this year have recognized these links.

One of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) proposed for adoption this September at the United Nations General Assembly aims to “ensure healthy lives and promote wellbeing for all at all ages.”

During the past 15 years, the world has learnt how ambitious global development goals can galvanize global support to improve the health of its poorest people. The MDGs have undoubtedly played an important role in saving the lives of mothers and small children, reversing the spread of HIV, turning the epidemics of malaria and tuberculosis around, and halving the proportion of people living without access to safe drinking water.

But the world has also learnt that, next time around, it needs to do some things differently. It needs to expand the focus to confront health challenges that were hidden, misunderstood, under-reported or overshadowed, so that no one will be left behind. As I have heard from many ministers of health, the MDGs placed too little emphasis on equitable health outcomes – not just national averages – and on addressing the root causes of ill health and all its associated misery. At the national level, the goals were focused more on the scaled-up delivery of commodities than on the building of fundamental capacities. In my experience, most countries want a hand up, not a hand-out.

Moreover, the demography of poverty has shifted. Today, 70% of the world’s poor live in middle-income countries. The world does not need any more rich countries full of poor people.

The world understands the importance of targets to prevent and respond to new, sudden health challenges like Ebola and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS-CoV), as well as protracted health threats, such as the slow-moving disaster of noncommunicable diseases (NCDs), primarily cancers, diabetes, heart and lung diseases. At the same time, accelerated action is needed to combat the infectious disease threat and improve maternal and child health.

And there is increasing acceptance that a new global health goal must extend life expectancy for all – we must achieve universal health coverage (UHC) in every community in every country of the world.

UHC should be a fundamental pillar of any government’s strategy to advance the wellbeing of its citizens. It can help ensure the strength of a country’s health system, making it more resilient to shocks, whether these come from a changing climate, a runaway virus, or an overload of patients with NCDs. Moreover, UHC is one of the most powerful social equalizers among all policy options.

A key element of UHC is ensuring that finances are available to provide all people with access to health services. This means paying the wages of doctors and nurses, buying medicines, getting the right incentives in place to promote efficiencies, and protecting people from the financial hardship that millions face from paying more than they can afford for medicines and treatment.

Evidence suggests that all countries, rich and poor, can find ways to raise sufficient funds for health, by tapping into new sources and by improving cost efficiencies.

The economic case for investing in health is strong. Take women’s and children’s health for example, where current evidence suggests that investment in reproductive and maternal and child health has a potential return of more than US$ 20 for every dollar spent.

When it comes to addressing NCDs, the health investment argument is equally clear: the estimated cost of reducing the NCD burden in developing countries has been estimated at US$11 billion from 2011-2025 (US$ 1-3 dollars per capita), compared to the US$7 trillion in lost economic output in developing countries associated with the four major NCDs under a “business as usual” scenario.

Tobacco taxation offers a ‘win-win’ policy option for governments, where raising tobacco taxes will both generate extra revenue and reduce consumption. Evidence from a growing number of countries shows that tax increases that lead to a 10% rise in retail tobacco product prices will cut consumption by 2% to 8%. Tax increases on tobacco products also generate significant revenues for the Government. In low-income countries, for example, a doubling of excise tax per packet of cigarettes increases cigarette tax revenues by more than 30%.

But while scaled up domestic financing for health and other development issues is clearly key, richer countries need to provide catalytic support to enable low- and middle-income countries to develop and complement robust home-grown solutions.

WHO will be working with our partners in government, civil society and our �山����sister agencies to increase the capacity, particularly in developing countries, to “ensure healthy lives and promote wellbeing for all at all ages”.