The Ebola crisis brought home to the global health and development community a scary realization that the World is not ready for pandemics or for dealing with other existing and emerging planetary health challenges. A number of commissions reviewed the national and international responses to the Ebola crisis and found a lot wanting. A repeated theme across the different post-Ebola commissions is a major failure by the donor community and by many countries in prioritizing investments in core health system functions, primarily public health infrastructure and capabilities. In order to address these obstacles in under-investments in core public health activities and functions to cope with these emerging challenges, WHO’s Department of Health Systems Governance and Financing, in close collaboration with other departments across WHO and external partners, has a knowledge program on financing common goods for health. The objectives of this knowledge program are to articulate, provide the technical and economic rationale for, estimate the cost of, and identify sources and modalities of financing for core common goods for health.
An initial output of this work will be a series of related papers published in a special issue of Health Systems & Reform to coincide with the September 2019 United Nations General Assembly (UNGA). The focus this year for the UNGA is on Universal Health Coverage (UHC), which will bring together heads of states as well as financing and health authorities. This launch event will clearly situate financing for these common goods for health within overall country and global efforts to move towards UHC. Furthermore, this agenda brings together several priority areas, including health security, water and sanitation, and communicable disease surveillance, emergency preparedness and antimicrobial resistance. This series of cross-cutting papers provides a platform for departments across WHO to come together to put forward the evidence base and policy tools to advance financing for these fundamental common goods for health.
Scope and purpose of the launch event
The launch event will bring together high-level individuals such as Ministers of Finance and Ministers of Health, as well as representation from notable external aid organizations. The purposes of this launch event are to present and discuss:
- key messages from the overall Health Systems & Reform paper series;
- domestic challenges with financing these goods and functions; and
- how to operationalize this work, including how we can support countries after the publication of this paper series.
For more information please contact: healthfinancing@who.int