This brief focuses on how pooling arrangements—the way countries combine funding from different sources to spread the financial risk of needing to pay for health services—can be improved to accelerate progress toward UHC.

Returning funds to the Ministry of Finance at the end of the fiscal year is the last thing any Ministry of Health wants to do. In Peru, health budget officials are rolling out a strategy to stop that from happening.

This Catalog allows practitioners to consider which interventions have more robust evidence bases to support their practical application, such as: enhancing worker and supervisor competencies through training, offering nonfinancial incentives for high performers, practicing task sharing to promote cost savings, implementing digital solutions to expand access to services, and reducing costs of procuring and distributing pharmaceutical products.

This primer is designed to help supply chain practitioners in governments, the private sector, donor agencies, and implementing partners understand the value of political economy analysis (PEA) and how it can help improve outcomes when implementing supply chain interventions and reforms. 

To advance progress toward universal health coverage, agreed-upon health priorities need to be reflected in national plans and budgets. This blog offers key lessons for ministries of health seeking to make that happen.

This learning resource presents key learning from the activity literature review, learning exchange meetings, and TA workshops. This resource focuses particularly on stakeholder engagement and institutionalizing stronger links between national health priorities, sector plans and national budgets, which learning partners identified as their most pressing issues.

Routine stakeholder engagement is critical to fair and inclusive national priority setting for health, but many countries face challenges in ​​reaching key groups. This blog shares promising practices for bringing in key stakeholders and making sure the loudest voices aren’t the only ones heard.

​​​For countries wanting to strengthen health budget execution, learning about promising approaches used by others is one thing but putting them into practice is another. This blog reveals how two countries, Lao PDR and Peru, adapted promising practices and began to implement them.

Ministries of health know that priority setting is important, but explicit priority-setting processes — processes that are inclusive, transparent, and informed by evidence — often are not institutionalized. This blog shares the promising practices being used in several countries.

This report synthesizes learning from an in-depth examination of successful MOH efforts that have led to increased health budget execution. It offers a vision of good health budget execution, as well as promising practices in the areas of budget structure and processes and budget accountability.

The case study shows the literature and previous work on health equity to identify promising approaches and strategies from Senegal’s experience to ensure more equitable financial protection, particularly for underserved and socially excluded populations.

How can countries make progress towards good health budget execution? In this latest blog in our budget execution series, ministry of health practitioners from eight countries offer lessons based on their own experiences and shared learning. 

Through an LHSS-Joint Learning Network learning exchange, health practitioners from seven countries are sharing successful experiences and promising practices to institutionalize explicit national priority-setting processes for health. The goal? To help countries set equitable national health priorities and ensure that these priorities are reflected in national health plans and budgets.

Both Ghana and Bangladesh have implemented health budget accountability mechanisms. Their experiences offer practical lessons that other countries can adapt to their own budget execution needs. 

What do Lao PDR, Malaysia, and Kenya have in common? All three countries have strengthened their budget structures and processes to enable good health budget execution. Their experiences hold valuable lessons for others striving to increase budget execution and unlock significant resources for health.