Highlights from the third NCD Alliance Forum

The third Global NCD Alliance Forum concluded earlier this week in Sharjah, UAE, attracting close to 400 delegates from 85 countries. This year, the theme was ‘Bridging the gap’ centering on how to translate global commitments into national and local action. The meeting attracted a diverse community of advocates including strong representation of youth, international journalists, and the disabled and indigenous communities. The AHA delegation include myself, our International ECC Regional Director, Zehra Hilali, and Jeff Willett, VP of Integrated Tobacco Strategy. Our contributions to the forum included speaking and facilitating several workshops on the topic of “Accountability during the Era of the E-Cigarette”, “Fueling Data to Support the Food System” and the regional consultation around gaps associated to donor/high income countries. Our team took advantage of networking and meeting with several participants that included private sector and civil society partners and will follow-up under separate email with some of you in greater detail. 

At the Global Forum, several publications were launched that may be of interest to us and should inform our global advocacy and programmatic work. They appear below for your reference:

• Bridging the Gap on NCDs: From global promises to local progress(link opens in new window), outlines the five main gaps in the first decade of the NCD response. Following each gap described, the main challenges and barriers to bridging these gaps are presented, in addition to a proposal of civil society actions to accelerate progress.
• The NCD Civil Society Compass(link opens in new window), is a pocket document presenting the proposal of civil society actions to tackle the 5 main gaps in the NCD response. This document intends to serve as a guide for civil society prioritization and planning. 
• The  NCD Atlas ‘Bridging the Gap on NCDs through Civil Society Action: Initiatives from National and Regional NCD Alliances’(link opens in new window) shares views of global NCD civil society and highlights top initiatives to combat NCDs

WHO also released its new 'Noncommunicable Disease Progress Monitor 2020(link opens in new window)', tracking the extent to which 194 countries are implementing their commitments to develop national responses to the global burden of NCDs. The report looks at countries’ progress towards a set of NCD indicators and as expected indicate shortcomings-- only 40 of over 190 countries are on track to meet SDG target 3.4 to reduce premature mortality from NCDs by one-third by 2030.
                                    
The launch of NCDA's new accountability toolkit, 'Pushing for Progress' also was launched to help national regional alliances keep governments’ accountable. We can expect there will be additional capacity building efforts from NCDA utilizing this new toolkit.  Also, at the Forum they unveiled the 'Turning the Tide', mini-films from 24 countries on NCDs, produced by BBC StoryWorks and NCD Alliance. Several of the mini-films feature our partners- Novartis Foundation (BHBC), World Stroke Organization and World Heart Federation. Plans are underway to feature the series during the upcoming “Health For All Film Festival” to take place in Geneva in May 2020. As supporters of the NCDA we have been asked to promote them and a media relations plan will be shared with us in the next few weeks.