As COVID-19 continued to dominate global health over the last year, the direct and indirect impact of the pandemic has led progress against the health-related SDGs to fall even further behind.  At the same time, crises such as armed conflict, increasing food insecurity, political and economic instability and the growing impact of climate change threaten to derail recovery from the pandemic.

A key way to respond to and ensure an equitable and resilient recovery from COVID-19 is for multilateral agencies to collaborate even more closely in providing effective and efficient joint support to countries, which is the foundation of the Global Action Plan for Healthy Lives and Well-being for All (SDG3 GAP).

SDG3 GAP is helping to promote synergies among its signatory agencies’ pandemic-specific responses and longer-term work to accelerate progress towards the SDGs by creating an improvement platform for collaboration on health among key actors in the multilateral system.

Progress on response to SDG3 GAP Joint Evaluability Assessment (JEA)

In line with recommendation 4 of the joint evaluability assessment, the signatory agencies have identified their respective agencies’ contributions in support of an equitable and resilient recovery from COVID-19. These contributions are summarized in Figure 1. The full contributions table is available here.

SDG3 GAP agencies' contributions for joint recovery strategy

The SDG3 GAP monitoring framework, now being piloted, seeks country perspectives on collaboration among the signatory agencies. Responses from 42 national governments or relevant authorities reflect an overall positive assessment of collaboration among SDG3 GAP agencies but indicate that – especially in low-income countries - more efforts are needed to align with national priorities and strengthen coordination. The responses include many concrete suggestions for improvement and emphasize that coordination should be country driven and that SDG3 GAP should help to strengthen coordination capacities in ministries of health.

As an improvement platform, SDG3 GAP has addressed to the extent possible the “structure” side of the multilateral ecosystem by building well-functioning communities of practice around accelerator themes in support of country-led plans and aligning these with existing networks and structures. What remains to be fully addressed, but is now being piloted, is the “function” side of the ecosystem: the joint funding, monitoring, evaluation, governance and accountability that is needed to further drive collaboration for impact.

As noted in previous progress reports, incentives are essential to encourage closer collaboration in the global health architecture. In the last year, four areas have been identified as key opportunities to further incentivize collaboration among the SDG3 GAP agencies: joint funding, joint monitoring, joint evaluation and joint “governance”. Approaches in each of these areas have now been piloted among the agencies with a view to refining and scaling them up in 2022 and beyond.

Taking these pilots to scale could be an important future focus of work under the SDG3 GAP and validating this insight and direction would be a desirable outcome of the 2023 independent evaluation. In doing so, the two ‘sides’ of multilateralism — namely, agencies and countries —must come together, because the incentives are set not by the secretariats of the agencies but by their governing bodies and the Member States they serve.