Applying and Learning about Equity-Enhancing Approaches for Health System Strengthening

Health system goals for universal health coverage (UHC) require a focus on equity to ensure that services are available and accessible to all who need them. The Accelerator employs various innovative health system approaches to promote and enhance equitable health systems, processes, and outcomes.

Drawing on USAID’s Vision for Health Systems Strengthening 2030, these approaches include engaging underserved and vulnerable populations in co-creative and priority-setting planning processes, strengthening community-based systems for health that build community capacity and promote trust in the health system, establishing mechanisms to promote social accountability, implementing social and behavior change approaches to promote equitable norms and empower people to improve their health, and employing inclusive implementation research to understand what works for equity and health outcomes.

The Accelerator conducts various learning activities to explore how to implement these approaches most effectively and to understand their impact on health or intermediate outcomes. For example:

Approaches for promoting inclusivity in health system decision-making, including examples of local actors and processes being “centered” in externally supported interventions, co-creative action planning exercises, collaborative root-cause analysis processes, and community engagement.
The use of implementation research to guide national health policymaking, with examples from the Accelerator’s experience applying IR in Georgia, Ghana, and Guinea to promote equity-focused outcomes.
Improving the linkages between social and behavior change and social accountability to help advance health system efficiency and equity.
Using behavioral science to design and implement health financial protection programs to help advance health system efficiency and equity.

WEBINARS

Please see this summary for more information about the webinar on Implementation Research for Health Equity, Inclusion, and Impact.

PODCAST

Pathways to Health Equity is a podcast that shares the work of the Health Systems Strengthening Accelerator, a project that partners with countries to translate, adapt, and build more effective and sustainable health systems.

When The Accelerator began six years ago, the goal was to partner with countries to build more resilient, high-performing health systems that benefit vulnerable populations. Since then, the Accelerator has worked in 17 countries in Asia and Africa.

On this podcast, host Nathan Blanchet talks with doctors and healthcare leaders from partner countries who share what they’ve learned about improving health systems and their successes through this work.

Listen to the Series