Health Systems

Strengthening Health Systems in Sub-Saharan Africa: "Developing a Public-Private Partnership in Health Systems Management"

Project Rationale:

• Very few countries in Sub-Saharan Africa are expected to meet any of the health-related MDGs, to a large extend due to their week health systems. Health systems can be considered a primary bottleneck to healthcare prevention or to the delivery or expansion or treatment in the region. This is mainly due to fundamental limitations in staffing, training and other components of essential institutional, capacity and systems development.
  
  
• Weak or insufficient healthcare infrastructures, capacity and capabilities in certain Sub-Saharan Africa countries, may soon even inhibit the ability to effectively absorb and/or deploy further increases in funding.
  
  
• Addressing core health systems management issues to date has simply not been sufficient. Accelerated decision-making and actions are imperative in order to move beyond addressing the symptoms. There is a need to tackle the causes head on, by building on learnings from private sector management expertise and experiences of best practices in the field.

Against this background, starting in September 2005 the GHI embarked on a process to identify clear and specific opportunities where businesses could work in partnership with the public sector, to strengthen Sub-Saharan African healthcare systems. The findings outlined in the GHI whitepaper entitled "From Funding to Action: Strengthening Healthcare Systems in Sub-Saharan Africa" See the report (PDF; 51 pages, 1.09MB) form the basis for a new partnership aimed at strengthening the management of the institutions that directly influence the performance of the health sector, focusing in particular on the Ministry of Health, leveraging private sector’s management skills and building on existing good practices on the ground to be implemented in the first pilot country, Ghana.

- From Funding to Action: Strengthening Healthcare Systems in Sub-Saharan Africa Report (PDF; 51 pages, 1.09MB)

- Strengthening Health Systems in Sub-Saharan Africa: Working with Governments (PDF; 2 pgs; 225k)

- Article from Perspective, African Journal on HIV/AIDS, Issue 12/2006: The Health of Healthcare (PDF, 2 pgs; 2.8MB)