Making a difference...
P4H is committed to managing diversity and encouraging coherence, thus ensuring that the principles of the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness and the Busan Partnership for Effective Development Co-operation work for what is an exceptionally complex issue. UHC/SHP constitutes a national agenda for change and development that involves difficult choices. It also concerns a broad range of actors and stakeholders in various sectors, and thus requires technical as well as political solutions to harmonise different interests and values. The challenge for P4H is to apply widely accepted aid effectiveness and development principles to this complex area across sectors and at the national, regional and global level.
...the added value of P4H
There are four main ways in which P4H can add value to joint network responses: by ensuring political commitment; by connecting different sectors; by scaling-up support; and by providing better and more support for UHC/SHP.
Adding value by ensuring political commitment - combining technical and political solutions. P4H is committed to ensuring that the process of moving towards UHC/SHP is fully owned, led and managed by individual countries. Without political commitment, the transition to UHC/SHP can easily stall or drift. So P4H also works to raise awareness about UHC/SHP beyond the technical level, to promote high-level political commitment.
Adding value by connecting sectors. P4H members are particularly well placed to encourage multi-sectoral collaboration, drawing on many years of experience working with a range of counterparts in different ministries, development and planning commissions, employers and employee associations and civil society organizations. P4H adds value by encouraging a broad-based, multi-sectoral approach to UHC/SHP that fosters coherence across the areas of health, social protection, finance, poverty alleviation and sustainable development, countering the natural tendency for stakeholders to address challenges solely from their own perspective. The P4H approach encourages public and private stakeholders to consider other sectors’ logic and constraints, allowing for the development of a truly inter-sectoral UHC strategy. The alignment of support in the area of UHC/SHP and existing social protection floor (SPF) frameworks is also a crucial part of the P4H mission, as is working with countries through inter-ministerial dialogue to support policy processes, policy revision, strategies and laws.
Adding value by improving the quality and dynamism of support. The P4H network adds value across a range of support activities, reflecting the different mandates and competencies of the P4H members. Experts from a wide variety of backgrounds, including health systems, health economics, social protection, sustainable development, public policies, etc. can address a broad spectrum of key questions and challenges. Working in multi-disciplinary teams composed of experts from the country, regional and global level of network partners, P4H promotes a balanced mix of strategic options and recommendations, while at the same avoiding duplication of effort, notably the time and resources wasted in the setting up of parallel UHC/SHP project streams. Thus, the network harmonises support within and across sectors - and increases the dynamics for accelerating the transition to UHC/SHP. P4H also draws on the normative expertise and international experience of WHO and ILO, both of which can provide vital support in helping countries develop actionable policy options that take into account global agreements (World Health Assembly resolutions 2005 and 2011, World Health Report 2010, ILO recommendation 202 from ILC-2012 and convention 102). To enhance the quality of support, P4H also encourages peer review within the network: the publication of incorrect, misleading or otherwise unhelpful material by any one of the network partners seldom goes unnoticed! The end result of this dynamic, open and synergistic collaboration is a network that is more than the sum of its parts.
Adding value by scaling-up support. The P4H network can also assist in scaling-up on-going support with the financial resources made available by its bilateral P4H members. These additional resources may be used to complement support activities and foster collaboration among network members at the country level. These resources thus serve as an indirect incentive for collaboration and harmonisation of support. Scaling-up support requires understanding the support need, taking into account what has already been achieved by the country network and where gaps remain. Since P4H does not work through physically pooled funding - mainly to avoid the establishment of another global fund, which could lead to further aid fragmentation - the preferred process is to develop a joint support plan at country level, which lists the various contributions of network partners and identifies the resource gaps. Taking country level support to scale is complemented by linking and harmonising activities with the regional/global activities of P4H, such as conferences, side events, regional and global training; and the activities of other networks such as the Joint Learning Network (JLN), initiatives such as SPF and partnerships such as the International Health Partnership (IHP).