Capacity-building on leadership for health promotion

Overview

Over 25 years after the Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion, many countries have developed health promotion policies, strategies and programmes. Various programmes are embedded in healthy settings such as health-promoting schools, and hospitals, healthy workplaces, cities, and communities. Each country also adopted different models of implementation and some of the health activities have been fragmented.

The Regional Strategy for Health Promotion for South-East Asia 2006 has re-emphasized the commitment to the Ottawa Charter (1986) and Bangkok Charter (2005) which provide specific strategic directions as guidance to Member States. The strategy encompassed decisions reached at the sessions of the WHO Regional Committee for South-East Asia, the Executive Board and the World Health Assembly, as well as commitments and actions reflected in the health promotion charters. The Regional Strategy for Health Promotion 2006 proposed the following priority interventions: infrastructure for coordination and management; capacity-building; regulation and legislation, partnership, evidence and financing for health promotion, policy, advocacy and social mobilization and management of change. WHO is requested to strengthen the capacity for health promotion across the South-East Asia Region and to support Member States in building capacity for developing policies, programmes, plans of action and guidelines, innovative and sustainable financing, and documentation of evidence.