Global Health Initiatives
Community campaign against dengue fever in Peru.
Significant new resources for health are now flowing to countries through global health initiatives. Typically these initiatives (such as STOP TB, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria, the Global Alliance for Vaccines, Roll Back Malaria etc) are focused upon particular diseases or services. But many global health initiatives recognize the problems that weak health systems pose to their goals, and have begun to develop strategies to overcome health system constraints.
- In 2001 GAVI launched a special tranche of funding designed to address system barriers, and GAVI recently initiated an exercise to help countries identify and resolve system constraints related to immunization programs.
- The Global Fund in its sixth call for proposals explicitly welcomes initiatives that strengthen health systems to be integrated into proposals to achieve results in the three core diseases.
- The 2nd Ad Hoc committee on the TB Epidemic recommended that the Stop TB Partnership promote collaboration between programme staff and health policy and decisions makers “to ensure that TB control programmes contribute to and build upon broader approaches to health systems strengthening and link with other public health interventions.”
This section of our website is designed as a resource for those concerned about how to use global health initiative support to build stronger health systems. It offers brief summaries of and guides to further resources on the various global health initiatives, and studies that have documented the effects of global health initiatives on health systems (DFID website).