Site Content

Health Systems 20/20 is a co-sponsor, co-organizer, and technical lead for the Performance-Based Financing for Health Results Workshop held in Kigali, Rwanda May 2-4, 2007. Ten qualified teams from sub-Saharan African countries were selected through a competitive process based on the following criteria: assessment of performance problems and the role incentives play, whether key stakeholder groups were represented in the team, and potential to champion a process to implement pay-for-performance programs in the home countries.

June 25-29, Health Systems 20/20 will conduct a workshop for 10 local consulting firms and NGOs that provide technical assistance and training in health systems strengthening. The overall purpose of this activity is to develop a model that will improve the capacity of local organizations to provide assistance in health systems strengthening. Each participating organization will send a two-person team to the workshop, one of whom will be the director of the organization.

The 5th NHA Symposium, a bi-annual international meeting of NHA practitioners, policy users, and supportive donors, took place July 6-7, 2007 in Lund, Sweden. As in past years, this event was carried out in collaboration with the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) and its implementing agent, the Swedish Institute for Health Economics (IHE).

The USAID Yemen health reform project (part of Health Systems 20/20) recently received an award from the Ministry of Health (MoH) for its leadership in conducting the health facility survey in the five focus governorates. The ceremony, held on March 27 at the MoH, and attended by Ministry officials and donors, was an occasion to celebrate the completion of the national survey.

Presenting at the iHEA conference to be held in Copenhagen, Denmark July 8-11 are the following Health Systems 20/20 staff:

USAID’s Office of Health, Infectious Diseases and Nutrition (HIDN) requested the development of a Health Systems Assessment Approach as part of its global Mainstreaming Health Systems Strengthening Initiative. The Health Systems Assessment Approach: A How-To Manual was developed by Health Systems 20/20, Partners for Health Reformplus (PHRplus), Rational Pharmaceutical Management Plus (RPM Plus), and the Quality Assurance Project (QAP).It is designed to provide a rapid yet comprehensive assessment of a country's health system.

USAID asked its three major health system strengthening projects (PHRplus/Health Systems 20/20; RPM Plus; and the Quality Assurance Project) to develop a rapid but comprehensive approach to assessing health systems by drawing from their experiences working on different, but complementary components of health systems. The result of this effort is an indicator-based, modular assessment tool—Health Systems Assessment Approach: A How-to Manual. This seminar covered the contents of the manual, the circuitous path to its development, and a range of applications in Angola, Azerbaijan, Benin, Ghana, Malawi, Pakistan, and Yemen.