Green light for new Asia-Pacific health financing mechanism

A recent meeting convened by the Global Fund, Asia Development Bank and APLMA took Asia and the Pacific one step closer to a new regional financing facility to support health systems development and achievement of universal health coverage (UHC).

With many countries in the region now actively pursuing the UHC goal, understanding the health system price tag – and figuring out how to resource it – is arguably more important today than ever.

And yet, many health systems share the same financing challenges:

Unstructured resources: Budgetary support for health systems is often piecemeal, grants are not enough, and funding timelines are too short or misaligned to national health plans.

Externally funded investments: Health funding is fragmented and unable to sustain successes, as a result of its ‘silo’ nature.

‘Old school’ funds: Much of the current financing is of a limited size, and not flexible or able to drive results at scale.

For many countries to achieve their UHC goal, there is a clear need for longer term, integrated and innovative forms of health system financing, which lie beyond what domestic funds or external donor grants can provide alone. Combining funds from several sources into one mechanism can be used strategically to extend the access countries have to larger resource pools, and allows for ‘blended’ forms of financing on the required larger scale.

It also incentivizes governments to contribute additional domestic financing, allowing donors such as the Global Fund to ‘frontload’ resources in order to help close large-scale funding gaps. For countries preparing to transition from donor financing, combining grants with loans can extend total financing over a longer period.

This has been the fundamental idea behind a new collaboration between the Asian Development Bank and the Global Fund. Originally brokered by APLMA, the partnership is exploring how funding from donors such as the Global Fund can be combined with ADB technical assistance and/or resources in focused ways to allow them to jointly ‘leverage’ much larger, concessional investments in countries. In this way, existing disease-specific resources could help to enable broader health sector development financing on a significantly larger scale.

During the latest in a series of meetings to review