African countries are designing and implementing health financing reforms to provide quality healthcare to their citizens while reducing financial hardship to households for health spending and achieving Universal Health Coverage (UHC). More recently, there has been a growing recognition of the importance of factoring in politics and stakeholder relationships in designing and implementing health systems strengthening interventions. From that perspective of looking beyond the technical solutions to address health system issues, collaboratively and inclusively defining bottlenecks and identifying potential solutions, SPARC intervened in Burkina Faso’s journey toward Universal Health Coverage (UHC). Burkina Faso’s Ministry of Health requested technical assistance from SPARC in 2020 to help operationalize strategic purchasing within Burkina’s health system. SPARC has developed a brief that describes SPARC’s intervention using the coaching approach in Burkina Faso for a two-year process (2020-2022) and highlights some key lessons from this engagement.