In many low income countries, the poorest people have insufficient access to effective, efficient and equitably distributed health services.
For instance, they do not have access to preventative services such as family planning, safe births and vaccinations. Nor can they access treatment when they are ill with the likes of malaria, tuberculosis, HIV or pneumonia.
Almost 10 million women and children die every year, many during pregnancy and birth. A large number of these die from easily treatable or preventable conditions, or from malnutrition.
The international community has the knowledge needed to save most of these lives, if we could reach people with the services they need.
We also know that focusing on strengthening health services would significantly advance the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) which are currently most off-track.
Our approach
Addressing single diseases alone will not result in either sustainable better health outcomes or better functioning health systems. That's why we have long promoted a systems approach and we work in several ways:
At country level:
- we provide high quality technical assistance to support governments and health providers to build capacity
- we work directly with partner governments to provide direct funding to health services
- we provide policy advice including outcomes monitoring and advice about reaching the poorest people with the health services they need
- our advisers work to support the health priorities in developing countries in a way that will make the best use of scarce resources.
At the global level:
- we support innovation through the development of public health goods, including new drugs and vaccines
- we build evidence and promote rational, sound policy that supports countries to make difficult choices about how to get the best health with the resources they have available
- we work to influence the global architecture so that donors and multilateral organisations work efficiently together through mechanisms like the International Health Partnership
- we demand better performance from multilateral organisations.
Read about the components of an efficient health service