Cross-programmatic efficiency analysis

Health programmes are able to target health interventions for specific diseases or populations. In low- and middle-income countries, this organizational approach has been reinforced by donor assistance for priority areas that often leads programmes to operate separately from one another in seeking to optimize the achievement of a specific objective. 

This fragmentation impacts how priority interventions are delivered and sustained, sometimes with entirely separate and overlapping systems that can be inefficient both for programmes and for the entire health system.  

As contexts change, and in particular, as responsibility for funding these programmes shifts more towards domestic resources, maintaining an array of programmes with distinct, separate organizational arrangements is unlikely to be affordable and is not sustainable.  The cross-programmatic efficiency approach has been adapted and embedded within WHO’s health financing and broader system analytical tools.

Policy briefs for selected country studies present key findings from the application of WHO’s cross-programmatic efficiency analysis. These policy briefs provide important examples from the application of this approach to share information and cross-country learning. These policy briefs are based on analysis from a particular point in time, with contexts continuously changing.

A self-paced, hour-long e-Learning course has been developed on cross-programmatic efficiency analysis and is open to the public. 

Through this course, you will learn how to unpack health programmes based on their common health system functions to understand how they interact with one another and the overall system, and where inefficiencies can be identified. After completing this module, you will know how to identify inefficiencies by taking a system-wide approach and will learn how to address these inefficiencies through targeted reforms. 

For more information and to register for the course, please click here.