About a month ago, this newspaper article about the Global Financing Facility caught the eye of folks at the World Bank. In the article, Aminu Magashi Garba from Health Reporters and our own Africa Health Budget Network coordinator, explains the potential of this fund. Hosted at the World Bank, it will channel both domestic and external funds toward maternal and child health, in line with the next Global Strategy for women and children. The Global Financing Facility has several objectives, namely:
- Mobilize additional international resources required for scaling up and sustaining efficient and equitable delivery of quality reproductive, maternal, newborn, child and adolescent health services, in line with country plans.
- Support the transition to long-term sustainable domestic financing for reproductive, maternal, newborn, child and adolescent health.
- Focus on the scale up of civil registration and vital statistics systems to contribute to universal registration of births and deaths by 2030.
- Finance activities which have benefits beyond individual countries, such as market shaping initiatives for drugs, vaccines or family planning commodities; technological innovations; or disease surveillance.
- Improve the coordination of external and domestic financing for reproductive, maternal, newborn, child and adolescent health around costed country plans.
You can find the full concept note here, and a summary of feedback from consultations here. Last week, the Global Financing Facility working group members (see Annex 1 of the concept note for a list of members) and a few others met in Addis Ababa to discuss the draft zero of the Fund’s business plan (this is not yet publically available). The business plan will provide much greater detail on how the fund will operate in practice. A first draft will be available in April for consultation, and a final draft will be available in May. View the full timeline here.Our goal is to influence those designing the business plan to set up systems that ensure:
- Those who commit and spend GFF funds are accountable to the citizens of the countries in which the funds are spent
- Full participation of civil society in the design of country plans at country-level and in the coordination, governance and oversight of the GFF at global level
- National-level health budget advocacy efforts are fully supported to ensure a successful transition to sustainable domestic health financing
Our strength in influencing this process lies in sourcing contributions and opinions from you, our members. Please email us at info@africahbn.org with your suggestions or comments, in relation to these themes specifically before 15 April.