GHANA – The Ministry of Health has developed a National Health Financing Strategy with funding from the United Nations Multi-Partner Trust Fund Office (UNMPTF) through the technical leadership of the World Health Organization (WHO).
The strategy will help address the funding gaps, boost investment and improve health outcomes.
Health financing has been identified as the key to unlocking progress towards the attainment of Universal Health Coverage (UHC) as enshrined in the 2030 agenda for sustainable development, especially the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 3.
On average, Ghana’s total health spending is lower than comparator Sub-Saharan African and lower-middle income countries.
However, it has a relatively higher share of health spending derived from public sources as compared to out-of-pocket sources.
External assistance for health has decreased dramatically as a share of total health spending between 2015 and 2019, falling from 25% to 11%.
This number is higher on average as compared to other lower-middle income and there is a concern about a lack of significant policy measures needed to facilitate a transition process whereby previously supported donor interventions are sustained with domestic, public financing.
“Ghana has taken very significant steps towards achieving the UHC and we recognized that financing our health ambitions cannot be realized without an effective strategy in place,” noted Mr. Kwakye Kontor, the Head of Planning & Budget Unit at the Ministry of Health and the lead Coordinator of the review of the Health Financing Strategy.
For the purposes of developing a comprehensive strategy that can be owned by all stakeholders, the Technical Working Group on Health Financing has been activated, comprising members from key stakeholder institutions to co-create the strategy to meet the current and future financing needs of the health sector.
Over the last 30 years, Ghana has shown its strong political, legislative, and fiscal commitment to health system reform to make progress towards UHC. This includes the UHC Roadmap and the Health Sector Medium-Term Development Plan (HSMTDP) 2022-2025.
Therefore, the health financing strategy is expected to complement existing efforts towards UHC attainment in Ghana.
“Given the financing needs of the health sector, this strategy is coming at a better time,” the Head of the United Nations (UN) Systems Unit, Ministry of Finance, Mrs Gladys Osabutey, indicated.
“With the inclusion of all key stakeholders in the strategy development process, I am convinced we will have the needed discipline for effective implementation.”
The significance of the strategy and its inclusive development process is not lost on Ghana’s health sector development partners.
The 2022 Ghana Health Financing Strategy (HFS) builds on the foundation of health vision, policy, strategy, and priorities contained in the UHC Roadmap and Health Sector Medium-Term Development Plan 2022-2025.
The HFS digs deep to identify, explore, and propose solutions to key, intractable, and longstanding health financing issues. It also develops specific strategies for the health financing functions of revenue collection, pooling and purchasing.
This two-pronged approach of addressing key, longstanding issues and further strengthening the three health financing functions creates dynamic, sequenced interaction and synergies between targeted activities and comprehensive strengthening, avoids duplicating the UHC Roadmap and ensures sufficient depth of strategies and plans to make progress in addressing the continued health financing and service delivery challenges in Ghana.
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