Joint Learning Agenda on Health Financing

Overview

WACI Health advocates for health budgets that are adequate, transparent and spent where the need is greatest. Through budget advocacy and accountability, including work on public financial management, it equips civil society to follow health money from allocation to spending and audit.

The Joint Learning Agenda (JLA) is a civil society capacity-strengthening programme on health financing, universal health coverage (UHC), and public financial management (PFM), led by two African women-led organisations: WACI Health coordinates the anglophone countries and Impact Santé Afrique (ISA) the francophone countries. Its third phase works with civil society organisations (CSOs) in 22 countries.

In the current financing environment, how well domestic health budgets are allocated, released, spent and audited is a central question for Africa’s health systems and the people they serve. These decisions are made in budget processes that civil society often finds hard to enter, because the documents are technical, the calendars are short and the entry points are rarely publicised. The JLA trains civil society organisations to read budget documents, track expenditure, and engage ministries of health and finance and parliamentary committees at the points in the budget cycle where those decisions are taken.

The programme began with backing from a consortium of global health initiatives: the Global Financing Facility, the Global Fund, Gavi, the Partnership for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health, and UHC2030. Its first two phases trained 535 civil society representatives from over 400 organisations.

Phase 3 focuses on PFM, the systems that decide how public money is planned, released, spent and audited. Supported by the Health Financing Strategic Initiative (HF-SI), hosted by the Global Fund, it trains civil society alongside government and parliamentary stakeholders in 22 countries on budget tracking, expenditure analysis and fiscal transparency.