While the technical skills and approaches needed to implement universal health coverage (UHC) are well established, the real challenge is political. How do we bring together stakeholders from the health and finance sectors and civil society organizations with different agendas?
The Leadership for UHC (L4UHC) programme brings these stakeholders together in two main ways.
- First, L4UHC coaches work with multistakeholder teams from various countries to forge a common vision of UHC.
- Second, L4UHC supports the processes countries set, helping them. During hands-on, 100-day collective actions, participants in L4UHC create the momentum to make their UHC vision a reality.
Enabling stakeholders to collaboratively form a common vision
Since its launch in 2016, L4UHC has helped more than 15 countries in Africa and Asia advance UHC – from Burkina Faso to Madagascar and from Cambodia to Pakistan. L4UHC’s core ethos is that each country can best determine the vision of UHC for its people.
L4UHC offers a platform for actors from various sectors to deepen their skills in collaboration. L4UHC coaches bring together participants from sectors such as health, finance and social security. The coaches take these participants through a series of exercises on navigating and managing the relationships essential for advancing UHC. Participants also visit countries with relatively well-established UHC systems, such as Sri Lanka or Tunisia, to gain insights into how they address the challenges. The result is a group of individuals acting together as one cross-functional team that develops a common vision of UHC in their country.
“The cultural transformation and the way teams adapt is just spectacular,” says Marisol Touraine, a former Minister of Health of France who has facilitated L4UHC sessions.
Implementing practical initiatives within 100 days
Each team then establishes a vision for UHC in its country, and all team members agree to implement collective actions within about 100 days. A coach living in the team’s country supports these collective actions. Results have included these: in Nepal, the national drug procurement process is better meeting demand; in Madagascar, the national health insurance fund set up by decree is being fine-tuned; Pakistan developed a long-term universal health insurance financing plan. L4UHC team initiatives have also helped build coalitions to implement further advances in their countries.
Moving forwards
The demand for L4UHC is growing. The P4H Network is exploring new governance and funding structures to more flexibly answer to countries’ needs.
