Ethiopia

There is no constitutional provision referring to a "right to health". However, the Constitution provides an obligation for the State to "allocate ever increasing resources to provide to the public health, education and other social services (article 41.4). In addition, article 89 states that the government shall endeavour to protect and promote the health, welfare and living standards of the working population of the country. Lastly, article 90 provides that to the extent the country's resources permit, policies shall aim to provide all Ethiopians access to public health and education, clean water, housing, food and social security.

Under article 51 of the Constitution, the powers and functions of the Federal government include the following: formulate and implement the country's policies, strategies and plans in respect of overall economic, social and development matters and establish and implement national standards and basic policy criteria for public health, education, science and technology (non exhaustive list).

No current national health policy was located in the country.

The main goal of the Health Sector Transformation Plan II (HSTP II) 2020/21-2024/25 is to improve the health status of the Ethiopian population by accelerating progress towards universal health coverage, protecting people from health emergencies, transforming woredas, and improving health system responsiveness (pages 1, 40-41).

HSTP II identifies 14 strategic directions, including enhancing the provision of equitable and quality comprehensive health services, improving health emergency and disaster risk management, ensuring community engagement and ownership, improving access to pharmaceuticals and medical devices, and improvement of regulatory systems (pages 47-66). The plan also emphasizes the importance of improving human resource development, enhancing informed decision-making, improving health financing, strengthening governance and leadership, improving health infrastructure, enhancing digital health technology, improving traditional medicines, ensuring integration of health in all policies and strategies and enhanced private sector engagement (pages 47-66).

Chapter 3, providing the situation analysis refers to a number of legal challenges across areas e.g., limited enforcement of existing laws and policies on the rights of women and girls (section 3.4.2), poor regulation of unhygienic practices (section 3.3.4.2). The section of the situational analysis addressing leadership and governance, while commanding a number of reforms implemented during HSTP-I (e.g. on tobacco control, medicines, food registration and alcohol), refers to the need to harmonize and strengthen the enforcement of all regulatory frameworks (section 3.6.1). Other challenges mentioned in the area of laws and regulations include sub-optimal uniformity in regulatory practices at public and private health and health related institutions, lack of independent regulatory body, Conflict of interest between regulatory and other sectors (section 3.7).

The HSTP II identifies 14 strategic directions (section 4.6), several of which address directly or indirectly strengthening of laws and regulations. Specifically strategic direction 5 "improve regulatory system" refers to several actions for the regulation of food, medicines, equipment and other health products as well as for the regulation of health professionals and health and health elated facilities (section 4.6.5). References to legal and regulatory interventions can also be found under other strategies e.g., on NCDs and mental health (section 4.6.1.4), on public health emergency and disaster management (section 4.6.2), leadership and governance (section 4.6.9), and traditional medicine (section 4.6.12).