In Namibia, The Ministry of Health and Social Services conducted a comprehensive training session, with LHSS support, aimed at enhancing the capacity of its senior staff members. The focus of the training was social contracting, with particular emphasis on need identification and the intricate processes involved in contracting civil society organizations through social contracting mechanisms.

The Ministry of Health and Social Services in Namibia, with support from the LHSS Project, convened stakeholders in Windhoek to validate the costing of the Essential Health Services Package.

The Ministry of Health and Social Services gathered stakeholders at Midgard Country Estate to consult on standard operating procedures for social contracting. The goal:  reach consensus on implementation plans and outline the path ahead, encompassing regional dissemination, pilot planning, and early implementation phases scheduled for later in the year.

Explore how the Ministry of Health and Social Services in Namibia, with support from the LHSS Project, is transforming health care access through the revised Essential Health Services Package.

The launch of the combined Health Accounts and National AIDS Spending Assessment exercise conducted by the Ministry of Health and Social Services in Namibia aims to improve the collective understanding of both health and HIV spending in the country.

The Ministry of Health and Social Services, with the support of the USAID-funded Local Health System Sustainability project, facilitated an extensive training on the combined System of Health Accounts/National AIDS Spending Assessment resource tracking approach which aims to generate detailed estimates of both health and HIV spending.

LHSS supports the Ministry of Health and Social Services in Namibia for the development of the country's groundbreaking UHC policy and Essential Health Services Package.  

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.

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.

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.