Islamset - Measuring Progress at the 11th World Conference on Tobacco or Health:

Proceedings INGCAT International
NGO MObilisation Meeting
Geneva, 15-16 May, 1999.

Measuring Progress at the 11th World Conference
On Tobacco OR Health
Joe Patterson,
Senior Consultant, American Cancer Society

Summary
Outcomes of health programmes are better when NGOs become involved. One of the objectives of the 11th World Conference on Tobacco OR Health is to increase the number of NGOs in the fight against tobacco. This will be particularly important in reaching areas of the world where there is very little tobacco control activity, and where the burden of tobacco related disease is high. The 11th World Conference will encourage development through scholarship to attend the conference, providing seed money to start programmes and by initiating global surveillance of tobacco related issues at the country level. International NGOs can enhance the development of tobacco control by attending the Conference to create new partnerships and provide new ideas, by making a formal organizational commitment to fight tobacco, and by getting affiliates to actively participate in tobacco control programmes.

First offal, on behalf of the American Cancer Society, we'd really like to thank INGCAT for your leadership in putting this meeting together. It's a very important meeting and we very much support what you are trying to do. We'd also like to thank the sponsors for their leadership and their commitment and of course their financial support.

NGOs and Government Action
Over the last two days the speakers have articulated the need for NGO support and leadership in tobacco control. Before I talk a little about the 11th World Conference, I want to make a couple of points. I've been in public health for 25 years, and half of that has been at local, state and federal agencies and NGOs One of the observations I've made over those 25 years is that whether we were dealing with heart disease or tobacco control, other areas of cancer, AIDS or immunisation, the outcomes were almost always better when there was strong NGO support that combined with whatever action the government was taking. It is very important to get a lot of NGOs involved, in particular NGOs that aren't the normal partners you would anticipate. I think that NGOs bring a balance to the effort. In tobacco control, NGOs give credibility to actions, particularly in the area of advocacy credibility that you also can't get any other way. At the same time, NGOs can keep government agencies from doing a lot of things they really shouldn't be doing.

The 11th World Conference on Tobacco or Health
The 11th World Conference will be held in Chicago, Illinois in the United States, August 6-10 in the year 2000. We expect around 3000 to 3500 participants. The conference objectives are:

To strengthen and expand global leadership
To increase the number of organizations and individuals engaged in the fight against tobacco, particularly with a focus on NGOs that have not participated in the
To promote ideas and strategies to create societal, political and economic change conductive to reducing tobacco use throughout the world, and
To promote the importance and strengthen the understanding of tobacco policy change and how to achieve it.

Essentially there are three conference themes that are overriding:
1- appraising progress and celebrating success,
2- nicotine: the present and the future,
3- advocacy in action.

In January of the year 2000, initial registration materials including the preliminary programme and call for abstracts will be mailed. In March of 2000 there will be a registration reminder card. April 2000 is the submission date for abstracts and posters.

There are two very unique aspects of the 11th World Conference that I'd like to briefly mention.

Scholarships for the Conference: World Conferences give us an opportunity to try to organise and stimulate action in different parts of the world. As in the past, this conference will provide scholarships to support the attendance and participation of people at the 11th World Conference. It appears that we funding to fully support approximately 200 scholarships and about 50 scholarships for people around the world. We want to support individuals primarily in developing countries who can help grow coalitions and alliances and intervention in their respective countries.

There are 192 WHA members states, of which 75 countries where tobacco control coalitions or alliances of some nature are relatively effective. This leaves 117 countries that we'll target most of these countries for two scholarships. But larger countries like India, China, Indonesia and Pakistan have more burden of tobacco and will have more future burden of tobacco, so we need to try to have more than two people. We'll to find 6-10 people from some of these countries if possible.

These scholarships to attend the World Conference are different to those given in the past. First, all of the people to whom we give scholarships will be asked to attend a training session about tobacco control, in Atlanta, 2 days prior to the conference in Chicago. The course will be taught by Office on Smoking and Health personnel and WHO personnel about the basics of a comprehensive tobacco control programme.

Another important innovation, dependent upon our fund raising ability, is to provide small financial grants our seed money to some of these representatives of countries to help them get started in some of their development activities. These seed grants will, we hope, be in the nature of between $5,000 and $10,000, which I think can help many of these countries go a long way. Tobacco control country profiles:

The tobacco control country profiles programme is a special project for the 11th World Conference and the American Cancer Society in collaboration with the Centers for Disease Control, Office of Smoking and Health and World Health Organization. The epidemiology department of American Cancer Society is coordinating this project right now, and the CDC will continue this global surveillance after the August meeting in 2000 in Chicago. We'll need help to check the accuracy of these profiles from all of you.

That's really what I have to say about the World Conference Again, I'd like to encourage NGOs from all sectors to come to the World Conference. We need to partner and collaborate in different ways and with deferent people. There will be a special session set up to hear reports from international NGOs. I'd like to personally urge all NGOs, if you haven't done so to date, to make a formal organizational commitment to embrace tobacco control as a priority and tog et your affiliates involved at all levels, and ion all ways to support this effort.

And I'll leave you with a couple saying. I grew up on a ranch in western United States and I often heard that event though I liked my dog a lot, sometimes the dog just won't hunt for you. And the other thing I always heard, was that if the house you are on dies, it's time to dismount. We need to be really willing to look at what it is we are doing in health programmes, and be honest to abandon the cause, we just need to change the ways we're doing things. In such we need to get a different hors.