At the Health Financing Technical Working Group this week, the Ministry of Health informed members that the Inter-Ministerial Steering Committee responsible for approving the Health Financing Strategy Draft and clearing the cabinet paper draft for the Single National Health Insurance before submission to cabinet failed to meet this August. According to the Ministry the cabinet paper would have had to be submitted in August (with the Health Financing Strategy in Annex) in order to be still considered for approval by cabinet before the up-coming Tanzanian presidential elections in October 2015. Since this has not happened, approval of the HFS as well as the legislation for the SNHI will most likely remain pending into early 2016.
The role of the P4H network in Tanzania will more than ever be to hold together the joint ambition of striving towards the suggested reforms of the HFS draft, in order for the momentum not to be lost. It will be important to continue preparing the ground for implementation of the strategic objectives in a coordinated and aligned way – particularly considering the multitude of planned and on-going projects/programmes geared towards governance and health financing in Tanzania at this moment (e.g. roll out of RBF (WB, USAID) and its alignment to the HFS objectives, BRN objectives and Basket funding indicators, Harmonisation and scale up of CHF (GIZ, KfW, USAID, SDC), USAID’s commencing 5 year Public Sector System Strengthening Project which has a strong financing component etc.). P4H partners need to ensure the positive dialogue with the relevant Ministries continues in line with the efforts that have gone into formulating the HFS in order to facilitate its up take by the new Government in 2016.
