Yet today, as we celebrate their extraordinary commitment to service, GFA must also speak about the unfortunate reality in the country. The Gambia’s nurses in public health centres are being asked to perform miracles in impossible conditions. 

Our public health facilities are routinely understaffed and stripped of essential medicines and functioning equipment. Our nurses show up every day not because the system adequately supports them, but in spite of the fact that it does not.

The current state of health in The Gambia is a crisis that demands honest reckoning. Access to quality health services remains critically low. The country bears a heavy and growing burden of both infectious diseases, including malaria, tuberculosis, and preventable childhood illnesses. In addition, there is a surging tide of non-communicable diseases such as hypertension and diabetes.

 Hypertension alone affects approximately 29% of the Gambian population, one of the highest rates on the African continent. Yet the current government has shown no coherent response to this escalating public health emergency. Immunization rates for measles, DPT, and hepatitis B have declined since 2017. 

This is a trajectory that leaves our children dangerously exposed to diseases that are entirely preventable. The medicine supply chain remains fragmented, with overlapping agencies, absent accountability, with life-threatening consequences. We need only recall the deaths of over 60 Gambian infants from contaminated cough syrup to understand the human cost of this institutional failure.

GFA believes that a healthy population is not a luxury. It is the foundation of every other form of progress. Healthy children learn better. Healthy workers produce more. A healthy nation develops faster. Investment in health is investment in The Gambia’s future.

That is why GFA is committed to a comprehensive transformation of the Gambian health system. We will reverse the decline in immunization rates within the first year of governance. We will overhaul the medicine procurement and distribution chain to ensure that no nurse ever again has to tell a patient that the healthcentre has no drugs. 

We will build and equip major hospitals in every administrative region, including in the fastest-growing urban communities that have been neglected for far too long. We will restore and properly finance the National Drug Revolving Fund and introduce real-time financial oversight. 

A GFA-led government will ensure that harmful foods and food additives linked to many non-communicable diseases are banned. To every nurse in The Gambia: GFA sees you. We see the long hours, the scarce resources, the weight of responsibility you carry for your patients and your communities – for us all. 

Your dedication is not taken for granted. You deserve a government that equips you to do your work, pays you what your service is worth, and builds a system worthy of your commitment and sacrifice. On this International Nurses’ Day, GFA pledges to fight for the health system that the nurses of The Gambia, and the patients who depend on them, truly deserve.