Vertical Health Funds and Aid Effectiveness

1
Vertical Health Funds and Aid Effectiveness

• by
• Dr Eddie Addai
• Director Policy Planning Monitoring and
  Evaluation
• Ministry of Health, Ghana

2
Introduction

• SPA study funded by USAID
• Country perspective on VHF/GHI
• Elicit recipient Government and NGOs
• experiences and concerns with VHF/GHI
• How they are integrating them into country health
  systems
• Paris declaration on Aid Effectiveness served as
  useful reference point

3
Vertical Health Funds

• Provide critical additional funding for scaling
  up interventions
• Usually predictable, reliable and timely
• Introducing new management practices
• Results based financing
• Expanding partnerships in countries
• NGO participation and capacity building
• Increasing attention for priority diseases

4
Vertical Health Funds

• Suffer from tunnel vision
• Creating disease silos
• Usually have parallel systems and processes
• Come with their policies and procedures limit
  ownership
• CCMs duplicate and not always linked to wider
  sector coordination mechanisms
• Off budget and off plan
• On the blind side of Ministries of Finance
• High transactions cost in proposal preparation,
  reporting and meeting fatigue
• Sustainability
• What happens to patients on treatment when funds
  run out, donor fatigue or poor performance?
• Crowd out other programs, skew planning,
  complicate coordination and lead to supply driven
  agenda
• Market shifts, rent seeking and budget dependency

5
Vertical Health Funds

• More actively incorporate Paris Principles
• Monitor system distortions of VHFs
• Increase fund flexibility to address system
  bottlenecks
• Move incrementally towards the use of country
  plans
• Put VHFs on budget and on plan
• Not equal to budget support but facilitates
  achievement of all the 5 Paris Principles
• Strengthen country coordination and interface
  with Ministry of Finance

6

• Too many policies that do not always match up
  and not enough action
• Donors should come together and have one
  strategy
• Some development partners are paying lip service
  to coordination while at the same time
  withholding information especially financial
  details that is considered essential to
  government planning