Yemen's Health Minister Presses UNOPS to Align Projects With Ministry Priorities

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Yemen’s Minister of Public Health and Population, Dr. Qassem Buhaybah, met a team from the United Nations Office for Project Services in Aden in early May 2026 to review the office’s ongoing work in the health sector and the mechanisms through which the two sides coordinate. According to the account carried by the official news agency at the time, the minister pressed for interventions to follow the priorities the ministry itself identifies, rather than being shaped principally by the funding cycles and programme designs of external partners.

That request is narrower than it sounds, and it goes to a structural problem in how health care is delivered in Yemen. UNOPS does not run health services. It is the United Nations body that implements infrastructure and procurement projects on behalf of donors and other agencies, which in the Yemeni context means rehabilitating hospitals and clinics, installing solar power and water systems at health facilities, and managing contracts that a ministry with limited liquidity cannot manage on its own. Where its projects go therefore determines which parts of the country see functioning services restored.

The scale of the gap is documented. Assessments cited in 2026 found that only around 59 per cent of Yemen’s health facilities were fully functional, leaving close to four in ten either partially functional or closed entirely. Just one in five facilities was able to provide maternal and child health services, a shortfall that falls directly on women in rural governorates who may have no reachable alternative. The World Health Organization appealed separately for 38.8 million dollars in 2026 to deliver emergency health assistance to some 10.5 million people.

A facility counted as partially functional is not a straightforward case of damage. More often the building stands and some staff remain, but there is no reliable electricity for refrigeration or surgery, no fuel for the generator, no functioning laboratory, or no supply of the medicines that would make a consultation useful. Solar installation and water rehabilitation, the kind of work UNOPS handles, address exactly those failures, which is why infrastructure projects and clinical services cannot be planned separately.

Salaries sit underneath all of it. Public health workers in much of Yemen have gone long stretches without regular payment from the state budget, and many facilities depend on incentive payments from international organisations to keep staff at their posts. That arrangement keeps services open but leaves the ministry supervising a workforce it does not pay, which is part of what the minister was addressing in asking that external interventions align with government priorities.

The health system is also carrying a heavy epidemic burden. Recurrent outbreaks of cholera, measles and other preventable diseases follow the collapse of water and sanitation infrastructure, and routine childhood immunisation coverage has fallen in areas where services are interrupted or where vaccination campaigns face resistance. Each outbreak diverts staff, cold-chain capacity and supplies away from routine care, which in turn widens the immunity gaps that make the next outbreak more likely.

The demand side has grown at the same time. The United Nations estimated that more than 22 million people in Yemen would need humanitarian assistance or protection during 2026, and rising rates of acute malnutrition among young children translate directly into demand for therapeutic feeding and paediatric care, two of the most staff-intensive services a weakened system can be asked to provide. Nutrition and health failures reinforce one another: a malnourished child is more likely to contract an infection, and an infection accelerates malnutrition.

Coordination in this environment is complicated by the division of the country between separate administrations, each with its own health authorities, and by the practical reality that agencies must negotiate access and reporting arrangements twice. The Aden meeting concerned the areas under the internationally recognised government, and the ministry’s writ does not extend uniformly across the country. Assessments of facility functionality are correspondingly uneven, and figures for the north and the south are not always compiled on the same basis.

The government’s broader position, restated repeatedly through 2026, is that international support should be directed toward electricity, water and basic services rather than being confined to emergency relief, on the argument that restoring those systems reduces humanitarian need at source. Donors have generally been more willing to fund short-cycle emergency programming, which is easier to monitor and to stop, and that tension has shaped the negotiation between the ministry and its partners.

Work continued after the May meeting. In July 2026 the ministry convened a steering committee in Aden, together with the World Health Organization and the Geneva Centre of Humanitarian Studies, to validate a national health strategy covering the period from 2026 to 2030, and later that month it held a further steering committee session with WHO, UNICEF and the Food and Agriculture Organization on pandemic preparedness. Both were attempts to move planning out of the annual humanitarian cycle and onto a longer footing.

Whether any of that translates into services depends on money that has not been committed. Health sits inside a wider humanitarian appeal for Yemen that has been running well short of its target, and a strategy document does not by itself reopen a clinic. What the May meeting established was a working relationship and a stated principle about who sets priorities, which is the precondition for the rest rather than a substitute for it.