Monitoring and evaluation in the Philippines
Estimation Year
1991-1997
Actual Policy Use
In countries where NHA is carried out periodically, trend comparisons help to evaluate if implemented strategies have had their anticipated impact. In the Philippines, NHA has been used to evaluate the impact of the government’s decentralization of the health sector, a policy enacted in 1993. Prior to the reforms, both central and regional government funding for “public” health care (services such as immunization, which benefits the community at large as well as the individual) was low, with central government funding actually decreasing significantly. NHA conducted from 1991 through 1997, before and after decentralization, found that spending on public health care actually increased from 25 percent to 35 percent of total government health spending in those years (Figure 1). This increase was largely due to increased funding from local governments, which allocated more than half their health resources to public health care in 1997.
Thus, NHA revealed that decentralization had not only not adversely affected local government allocations to public health, but that the allocations actually had increased. NHA, and in particular its implementation on an annual basis, provided significant insight into the impact of decentralization on health care.
Source
Schwartz, J.B., R. Racelis, and D.K. Guikey. November 2000. Decentralization and local governemtn health expenditures in the Philippines. Working Paper 0136. MEASURE Evaluation Project
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