On July 22nd 2019, Nairobi, Kenya –WACI Health and GFAN Africa conducted a three-day health financing literacy training to enable civil society to do advocacy for increased domestic resources for health. CSOs from 13 African countries participated in the training.
“Thanks to economic growth, more African countries are in a position to increase domestic finance towards national health development agendas, instead of overly relying on Official Development Assistance.” Rosemary Mburu, Executive Director of WACI Health.
The training modules covered topics on National Budgets, Bilateral Funding Mechanisms and Multilateral Funding Mechanisms. According to the AU Framework for Global Solidarity and Shared Responsibility for AIDS, TB and Malaria, increased DRM guarantees increased accountability, citizen’s participation, public financial management, efficiency, equity, and higher domestic policy ownership. It will also be critical to ending the epidemics of AIDS, TB, and malaria through direct funding of the majority of national responses and by demonstrating the leadership to `guide donors’ investments through ODA and multilateral institutions like the Global Fund.
“African Heads of State committed to end AIDS, TB and malaria by 2030. This would require that donors maintain or increase their contributions to the Global Fund, and that African countries increase ownership of their development agenda through significant domestic contribution for the three diseases.” said Linda Mafu, Head of Political and Civil Society Advocacy, at the Global Fund. “Many African countries will transition out of donor assistance in the next five to ten years thus there is urgent need to mobilize domestic resources in response to this transition.”
Training participants acquired skills on advocacy; research and translation of data and evidence; engagement in health sector planning, budgeting, reviews and reporting on DRM; understanding allocations and spending and how these two relate to macro-economics: how to make an investment case to show the impact of health spending on a country’s economic growth and prosperity among other skills.