“Tokyo Declaration on Universal Health Coverage: All Together to Accelerate Progress towards UHC”

We, the Co-Organizers of the Universal Health Coverage (UHC) Forum, reaffirm our commitment to accelerating progress towards UHC, and to achieving health for all people, whoever they are, wherever they live, by 2030…

We reiterate the importance of target 3.8 of the SDGs, which seeks to provide all people with access to high-quality, integrated, “people-centred” health services. This must include promotive, preventive, curative, rehabilitative and palliative health services, as well as safe, effective, quality and affordable essential medicines and vaccines. We want to ensure that people do not suffer financial hardship when accessing services. We emphasize the importance of protecting all people from health risks such as outbreaks, and responding rapidly to outbreaks and crises.

We acknowledge that health is a human right and that UHC is essential to health for all and to human security. We adhere to the principle of Leaving No One Behind, which requires special effort to design and deliver health services informed by the voices and needs of people. This prioritizes the most vulnerable members of the world’s population — children and women — those affected by emergencies, refugees and migrants, and marginalized, stigmatized and minority populations, so often living in extremely difficult circumstances.

At least half of the world’s population still does not have access to quality essential services to protect and promote health.

800 million people are spending at least 10 percent of their household budget on outof-pocket health care expenses, and nearly 100 million people are being pushed into extreme poverty each year due to health care costs…

By 2023, the midpoint towards 2030, the world needs to extend essential health coverage to 1 billion additional people and halve to 50 million the number of people being pushed into extreme poverty by health expenses…

We also emphasize the importance of strengthening the breadth and depth of data at the national and subnational levels, including disaggregated data, to inform evidence-based policymaking and to assess progress, as well as strengthening the capacity of local stakeholders to analyse and use data…

Accelerating progress towards UHC requires systematic learning from country experience through platforms such as UHC2030, increased focus on policy coherence, addressing implementation bottlenecks, and harnessing the potential of system innovations and effective and affordable technology in the health sector. We commit to stimulate learning on innovation for UHC by accelerating the generation and sharing of critical knowledge by building on and enhancing coordination of existing and future networks.

We look forward to future convenings and sharing the progress made towards UHC with the Global Community, in the context of the World Health Assembly, the High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development and the UN General Assembly, upcoming high-level UHC meetings such as the 2018 40th Anniversary of Alma Ata, and at the next UHC Forum. We extend our deep appreciation to the Government of Japan for its commitment to supporting the continuation of the UHC Fora in the future.