No country will make substantial progress towards Universal Health Coverage without a strong capacity to strategically purchase health services. As illustrated with our 2016 meeting in Rabat, the Communities of Practice want to contribute to the development of these capacities in Africa. One lesson which emerged from Rabat was the need to help countries and experts better understand what Strategic Purchasing (SP) is about. In a pair of blogposts, I suggest that mapping SP around two poles of responsibility could be helpful. In this first post, I focus on the responsibility of the purchasers. Most hyperlinks refer to power point presentations from a recent meeting in Geneva, organized by WHO. Read more here.