Changing the Conversation: Making progress on strategic health purchasing in sub-Saharan Africa

SPARC and its consortium of 11 technical partners are working together to better understand what drives progress on strategic health purchasing in sub-Saharan Africa through the lens of health purchasing functions—specifying benefits packages, contracting, provider payment, and performance monitoring– rather than specific schemes or solutions.

SPARC and the technical consortium co-created a framework to describe and assess strategic purchasing systems taking this “functional approach.” They applied the framework to map purchasing functions, capacities, governance arrangements, and results in nine African countries with some benchmarks to indicate progress.

SPARC is launching a virtual policy dialogue series and knowledge products to share the learning and insights from this approach and stimulate active discussion about how policymakers, technical partners, and other stakeholders can apply this knowledge to continue to drive strategic health purchasing progress in their countries. 

Scroll to top

A message from the partners of the Strategic Purchasing Africa Resource Center (SPARC)

Since 2018, The Strategic Purchasing Africa Resource Center (SPARC) has been a unique and significant force in supporting countries within Sub-Sahara Africa (SSA) in crucial areas of strategic health purchasing (SHP), Healthcare Financing as they make progress towards the realization of Universal Health Coverage (UHC) goals. This initiative, a collaboration between Amref Health Africa and Results for Development (R4D), has made expertise in these areas more accessible and has been instrumental in the progress of the target countries. The initiative was designed to advance policy discussions and actions that strengthen the application of strategic health purchasing to strengthen African health systems and support countries as they address foundational reforms…