With increased migration around the world posing unique challenges and opportunities for health systems, efforts to better integrate and include migrants and host communities in national health systems are an integral part of the global health equity agenda. 

Improved referral system helps those experiencing poverty in Nasarawa State to better access to secondary care.

This brief introduces the social determinants of health (SDOH) concept and terminology, and discusses approaches to addressing SDOH. Understanding these root causes of health inequities and their impact on health care access, quality, and equity is crucial to strengthening health systems.

Health workers are welcoming new policies that promote equitable access to employment, professional development, and promotion opportunities.

Through energetic and broad stakeholder collaboration, the country’s long-stalled effort to pass a UHC policy has gained momentum.

In a municipality where over 100,000 people had no access to basic health services, stakeholders joined together to open a primary health center that now serves thousands of households.  

In the wake of recent political conflicts and global sanctions, Afghan women once again have access to family planning and maternal and child health products, thanks to the devoted efforts of a private social marketing organization.

This brief highlights the recent shifts in health systems practice toward more explicitly incorporating an SBC lens in social accountability activities that aim to improve overall health system performance and address inequities. The brief synthesizes the growing body of evidence on the role social accountability plays in increasing accessibility to better-quality health care services and uses case studies and lessons learned to highlight how SBC approaches can be more explicitly integrated into this aspect of HSS programming.

This brief presents what LHSS has learned through applying a systems thinking approach to its support for HSCs’ advocacy efforts in expanding PHC services in urban Bangladesh.

This two-pager focuses on USAID’s Learning Question 5, “What are effective and sustainable mechanisms or processes that enable the participation of private sector, civil society, and public organizations in developing locally-led solutions to improve high-performing health care, especially for poor and vulnerable populations? What enables the effective participation or leadership of marginalized populations themselves in the development and implementation of these solutions? Under what conditions is this participation different?”

New efforts will make health care more affordable for residents in 10 municipalities.

LHSS is supporting local government institutions in Bangladesh’s densely populated Rajshahi and Sylhet Divisions to expand access to primary health services and reduce out-of-pocket expenditures for low-income urban residents. 

This technical guidance document provides a summary of principal findings that highlight those complex factors including a literature review, surveys, resource mapping, case studies including key informant interviews, and the development of a theory of change.

This brief shares insights from LHSS’s review of Timor-Leste’s thriving landscape of civil society organizations (CSOs), with a focus on those that are active in the health sector.

Meet Jessica. Her little girl is one of more than 40,000 migrants who have been enrolled in Colombia’s national health insurance system with support from the LHSS Project.