Improving aid coordination in the health sector

Overview

For many years in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), multi and bi-lateral organizations played an important role in delivery and financing of health services, along with the government. However, lack of coordination among partners and weak national leadership resulted in misaligned priorities, duplication of services and waste of resources. Most aid was earmarked for specific programmes rather than for the delivery of basic health services. It created parallel funding channels, management and procurement units, resulting in high administrative costs and uncoordinated activities. In 2005, a Health System Strengthening Strategy marked the beginning of the Government’s re-appropriation of health policy from external agencies and led to a number of important reforms. The paper discusses the strategy that established a national coordination mechanism and promoted single operational district plans with multi-donor inputs. The government also improved the national procurement system by pooling resources for medicine supply and distribution. The case study demonstrated positive results and successes in terms of reduced fragmentation, duplication, program management cost and mobilisation of new domestic resources for health in the DRC.

Synthesis report

The Democratic Republic of the Congo case study is part of a synthesis report that applied a causal framework to synthesize lessons from ten case studies of various health system reforms which aimed to improve the efficiency in health systems.