Sustainable Financing

The Challenge

There are many critical ingredients that are required to build strong health and education systems, but reliable financing is one of the most important. From buying books to paying salaries, nothing happens without funding.

Many low- and middle-income countries rely on a mix of revenue — from donors, the private sector and domestic resources — to fund social sector programs. But this can be challenging since funds from outside sources often come with strings attached, are time-bound or can be retracted.

In order to ensure that critical health, education and nutrition gains are sustained and expanded, governments must make already-limited domestic resources stretch even further. Ensuring that domestic resources and the systems through which they flow are as effective and efficient as possible is critical to supporting healthy and educated people now and into the future.

Our Approach

At Results for Development, we believe that domestic, government-raised funding that flows through a country’s own public finance system is the backbone of sustainable and equitable financing. That’s why we work with country change agents to help them formulate, mobilize, allocate and monitor financial resources.

Three important objectives underlie our approach to achieving sustainable financing:

• Mobilize: Ensuring prioritized, sustainable and coordinated mobilization of resources.
• Use: Making equitable, effective and efficient use of resources.
• Hold to account: Does spending equate with high-quality results?

In order to achieve these three objectives, there must be an open dialogue between a complex set of actors, often including policymakers, budget analysts, program managers, providers, civil society stakeholders and the public.

R4D helps to facilitate these conversations, while also building the capacity of key players to foster dialogue.

We provide change agents with the evidence that they need to positively impact policy decisions and spur implementation progress. This includes support to advocates and policymakers to understand public financial-management systems and influence different stages of the budget cycle; analytics that provide partners with the information that they need to make timely, evidence-based decisions; and targeted research into financial instruments or schemes and their various pros and cons. We also work to connect change agents across countries so that they can learn from each other’s experience and co-develop innovative new ways of thinking about sustainable financing challenges.