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A partnership to support primary health care
from 3.1 in 2002 to 8.2 in 2013), and a reduction by 47 percent in out-of-pocket financing between 1999 and 2012 (World Bank 2018a). Box 4.5 provides additional examples of how a key donor facility is supporting countries’ strategic planning processes in health.
BOX 4.5 GLOBAL FINANCING FACILITY AND THE WORLD BANK: A PARTNERSHIP TO SUPPORT PRIMARY HEALTH CARE
The Global Financing Facility for Women, Children and Adolescents (GFF)—a country-led partnership between country governments, development partners, the private sector, and civil society organizations—supports 36 low-income and lowermiddle-income countries.Hosted at the World Bank, the partnership focuses on catalyzing high-impact investments for reproductive, maternal, newborn, child, and adolescent health and nutrition improve RMNCAH-N in the world’s most vulnerable countries, while also strengthening the wider health systems needed to deliver at scale and sustain impact. The GFF has pioneered a shift from traditional development approaches to a more sustainable way forward where governments lead and bring their global partners together to support prioritized, costed national plans with evidence-driven investments to improve RMNCAH-N through targeted strengthening of service delivery systems, particularly primary health care—to save lives. By facilitating multistakeholder country platforms, the GFF supports its partner governments to mobilize and align both domestic and external funding behind national priorities. As of June 2020, the GFF has directly invested about US$602 million in grants linked to approximately US$4.7 billion of World Bank International Development Association (IDA/IBRD) financing and helped align much larger volumes of domestic public and private resources, as well as external financing in support of GFF partner country investment cases. In line with GFF’s new strategy, it also provides critical technical assistance and support in key areas such as country leadership and alignment of partners, gender equality, health system redesign, health financing, and results. The GFF’s collaborative, country-led approach has already yielded significant results in improving access to PHC-related services by drawing attention to the front lines and community-level delivery, as well as by funding health system reforms. For example, in Côte d’Ivoire, the country’s investment case that focused on strengthening primary health care has resulted in the prime minister’s decision to increase the health budget by at least 15 percent annually. In Cambodia and Tanzania, the GFF country-driven processes led to the integration of nutrition into the full continuum of essential health services for maternal and child health. Other investment cases in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mozambique, and Niger have focused funding on a prioritized set of high-impact services delivered at the primary care level and have designed reforms to increase the share of funds that flow to, and are managed by, frontline service providers.
Source: Global Financing Facility for Women, Children and Adolescents, https://www .globalfinancingfacility.org.
