5th Meeting of the Montreux Collaborative on Fiscal Space, Public Financial Management and Health Financing

15 – 19 November 2021

Overview of the meeting

Since 2014 WHO has convened the Montreux Collaborative bi-annual meeting bringing together experts and partners to discuss the critical relationship between fiscal space, public financial management (PFM) and health financing towards advancing the universal health coverage (UHC) agenda. The aim of the Montreux Collaborative is to raise the profile of public finance towards achieving UHC, to generate and exchange ideas and lessons to support the implementation of tailored reforms in health, and to consolidate and broaden the network of experts and partners interested in public finance issues for health.

This year, 2021, not only marked the 5^th meeting of the Collaborative, but it was the first meeting held in the context of COVID-19. COVID-19 is both a health and an economic crisis that has implications for health financing and progress towards UHC. The crisis has exposed systemic PFM bottlenecks in health spending. It has forced countries to adapt their PFM systems to provide greater financial flexibility and to tailor accountability systems to respond to this unprecedented crisis. In response to the rapidly developing context, this meeting explored policy options to help countries rebuild and strengthen health financing and PFM systems to make them more responsive to future shocks and able to sustain efforts towards UHC.

The meeting was held virtually from 16 to 19 November 2021 and was open to the public. On 15 November 2021, a series of pre-meeting events took place to mark the 5^th meeting of the Montreux Collaborative. It included keynote speeches from renowned members of the Collaborative and a book launch for How to make budgets work for health: a WHO guide for designing, managing and monitoring programme budgets in the health sector.

The Montreux Collaborative meeting was organized by the WHO Department of Health Systems Governance and Financing in collaboration with various development partners, foundations and civil society organizations active in the PFM and health agenda, including the World Bank Group, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), Gavi, The Vaccine Alliance, The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, International Budget Partnership, Results for Development (R4D), and ThinkWell.

Below you will find the recordings for each of the 5 days of this meeting. The presentations from each day can be downloaded at the bottom of the page.