Global Oxygen Alliance Strategy: Executive Summary, 2024-2030

Highlights from the GO₂AL Strategy: Executive Summary, 2024-2030

Oxygen is vital for life. For the sick and injured, medical oxygen is a lifesaving essential medicine with no substitute. Oxygen is needed for surgery, trauma, emergency, critical care, and for treating the elderly, pregnant women with obstetric complications, and newborns and children in respiratory distress. Yet most health facilities in low- and middle-income country (LMICs) do not have access to medical oxygen. World Health Organization (WHO) surveys have found that fewer than half of all health facilities have uninterrupted access to oxygen. In LMICs, essential components of the oxygen ecosystem have been non-existent, limited or fragile due to historical neglect of the requisite infrastructure and human resources elements. Factors contributing to oxygen access barriers include financing gaps, shortages of trained workforce, weak maintenance and delivery systems, a lack of data and limited policy and planning capacity.

With nearly 25 million deaths arising each year from conditions that require medical oxygen, including 6 million from pneumonia and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) alone, many of these deaths could be prevented with access to medical oxygen, enabling countries to make faster progress in achieving most of the Sustainable Development Goals for health. Moreover, increasing oxygen availability would have a profound, lifesaving impact on surgical outcomes, and contribute towards meeting Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) indicators. Given the likelihood of another respiratory pandemic on the scale of COVID-19 in the next decade, it is imperative to strengthen oxygen systems now to safeguard health security and protect human life. To this end, the Global Oxygen Alliance has developed a 7-year strategy (2024–2030) to align with the SDG 2030 agenda.

The Global Oxygen Alliance (GO₂AL) was launched in May 2023 to expand the impact of investments made during the pandemic by its predecessor, the ACT-A Oxygen Emergency Taskforce. This will entail securing financing to expand production, seeking to lower the price of oxygen, and providing technical support on oxygen to countries. In addition, GO₂AL will take a more inclusive and planned approach that emphasizes the importance of assessing oxygen and oxygen systems needs at the country, regional and global levels through key partner engagement, working with countries, industry, civil society and communities, to facilitate bottom-up planning, programming and resource mobilization.

To find out more about GO₂AL’s Strategy, it’s five key objectives, its governance, and what is needed to close the oxygen gap, please read the GO₂AL Strategy: executive summary, 2024-2030. In 2024, when more oxygen-related data is expected to be made available, GO₂AL will be developing its full strategic plan and budget.