Acting Director at the Health Promotion Division of the Ghana Health Service (GHS), Mabel Asafo has attributed Ghana's inability to tackle basic but critical health areas to inadequate private sector support.

She noted areas such as maternal and child healthcare, malaria, and sexual reproductive health, among others continue to remain areas that need to be projected among citizens to be cautious.

Her call comes amidst the sector's indicators showing underperformance in promoting good health practices among Ghanaians.

"When you look at some of our indicators, those are the ones that need to be beefed up. And these are malaria, water, sanitation and health, sexual reproductive health. And so we are looking at these indicators to build it up to make sure they get better within the health sector and they are of concern to the Ghana Health Service," she added.

At the National Inter-Agency Coordination Committee for Health Promotion, ICC-HP annual review meeting, Madam Asafo highlighted crucial health areas in Ghana that need to be propagated for citizens to be wary of.

She said citizens need education to adopt a healthy lifestyle.

The service had failed earlier in an attempt to embark on promoting healthy life behaviour among communities due to low private sector participation.

"We started earlier on but we did not engage the private sector much and so we did not succeed. Going forward we think that when the private sector comes on board, it brings about sustainability. It is on that ground that we are bringing on board the private sector."

The Chairperson of the National Committee for Inter-Agency Coordination Council, Health Promotion, Professor Kaufman reiterated the need for partnership between the private sector and government towards promoting health across the country.

She said that individual stakeholder efforts towards promoting health lead to waste of Ghana's limited resources and task duplication towards a single goal.

"For a long time, there has been a lot of activities around health by different stakeholders in Ghana, everybody doing something which is good. But the activities have not been coordinated. We are not making the best use of our scarce resources. If we can all work together ( government and private sector), we can have better results,

"So that's what this coordinating committee is about. One key thing which we have started from the memorandum of understanding you saw is to bring in the private sector to work with the GHS promotion division to propagate this strategy that we have in place and to make sure everybody is on board and doing the same things, saying the same things so that we have harmonious message we are presenting to the Ghanaian public," she stated.

Prof Kaufman added that the seven private new partners who joined the ICC-HP will help utilise scarce resources effectively.

The Health Promotion Division of GHS signed a Memoranda of Understanding (MoU) with seven Ghanaian private sector organizations who pledged their support for health interventions with a total private sector investment valued at 4.2 million cedis.

This initiative is part of a larger strategy to involve private companies in health promotion across Ghana.

The new private signees were; Azar Chemical, Nim Avenue, Radio Justice, Skyy Media Group, Multimedia Group, EIB Takoradi and Zoomlion.