World Oral Health Day 2024 | WHO

Message from WHO Regional Director for Africa, Dr. Matshidiso Moeti

Oral health remains a neglected part of person-centred health care and wellbeing. 

Oral diseases, such as dental caries, gum diseases, and tooth loss, remain prevalent in the WHO African Region, affecting about 44% of the population. Despite the innovative measures of our regional team, our region has had the largest increase in cases of major oral disease in the past 30 years of WHO’s six regions. 

The good news, however, is that most oral diseases are preventable through controlling common risk factors, like avoiding the use of tobacco and alcohol, adopting a healthy diet low in free sugar, and brushing teeth with fluoride toothpaste twice a day.

The neglect of oral health in the WHO African Region is obvious in the level of under-investment. For instance, half of the countries in the WHO African Region lack oral health policies. In 2019, over 70% of the countries of the region spent less than one US dollar per person per year on treatment costs for oral health care. 

Moreover, there is a chronic deficit of the oral health workforce in the region, for example, having only 0.33 dentists per 10,000 population, a mere tenth of the global average. 

Our regional team continues to invest in strengthening countries’ capacities for oral health promotion, oral disease prevention, and control; our team integrates this as part of NCDs prevention and control into national health services delivery systems toward universal health coverage.

We commend Burkina Faso, Lesotho, Mali, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone for developing and implementing national oral health policies in 2023. 

We acknowledge the trail-blazing leadership of Nigeria and 14 other African countries among the 32 globally that resulted in the December 2023 official recognition of noma as one of the neglected tropical diseases. 

We equally commend the work of the over 4,400 health professionals and community actors in 11 noma priority countries that leveraged the WHO noma online course to enhance their capacities for the promotion of oral health, detection, and control of early stages of noma and referring same in 2023. 

We applaud the resilience of the over 5,800 healthcare and non-healthcare workers, as of 29 February 2024, who embraced the online course on oral health for community health workers. 

We acknowledge that these capacity-building activities were made possible through the support of The Borrow Foundation, Hilfsaktion Noma e.V., the Harvard School of Dental Medicine, WHO collaborating centres, and other experts. 

We also acknowledge the support of the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Nairobi in bringing together more than 70 delegates from the academia and ministries of health to the meeting on “Evidence to policy: Accelerating the implementation of the regional and global strategies on oral health in the WHO African Region”. The delegates discussed a set of actionable recommendations to accelerate the creation, dissemination, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of evidence-informed oral health policies and programmes in the region in line with the WHO global and regional strategies on oral health.

While some progress has been seen, we must do more. 

This 2024 World Oral Health Day, we call on multilateral and bilateral stakeholders, and the non-health sector and the private sector, to join hands with ministries of health in driving a multi-sectoral response to the region’s silent epidemic of oral diseases. 

Learn more:

WHO Regional Office for Africa Oral Health Topics