The Comprehensive Financing Tool equips countries to navigate complex funding landscapes and optimize domestic and global resources to ensure sustainable access to essential health products for maternal and neonatal health, family planning and menstrual health.
The Challenge
Access to reproductive and neonatal health supplies* in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) is threatened by insufficient, unreliable and fragmented financing. Declining donor contributions, stagnant domestic spending and growing demand have created significant funding gaps. Global financing mechanisms, positioned to supplement and incentivize domestic resource mobilization, are often complex and difficult to navigate due to unclear requirements for eligibility, a lack of guidance in how to optimize or leverage multiple mechanisms at once and inefficiencies in application and reporting processes. Simultaneously, mobilizing domestic resources in LMICs for reproductive and neonatal health is subject to competition from other health areas, shifting political priorities, limited fiscal space and challenges in public financial management. Taken together, these dynamics undermine the impact of both global and domestic financing opportunities to improve access to RH and neonatal health supplies in low-resource settings.
* For this scope of work, reproductive health (RH) supplies encompasses family planning, maternal, and menstrual health commodities. For ease of reading, we will refer to these supplies throughout this scope as ‘RH and neonatal health supplies.’
The Opportunity
Donors and country-level decision-makers alike are eager to overcome information asymmetries and other barriers that hinder the effective use of global financing mechanisms for RH and neonatal health supplies and directly impact the availability of essential products for maternal and neonatal health, family planning and menstrual health. By equipping countries with clearer guidance on leveraging global financing options and identifying the most impactful domestic financing strategies for their unique contexts, this initiative empowers country stakeholders to play a more proactive and informed role to not only increase financial commitments for RH and neonatal health supplies, but also ensure that financing approaches are diversified, coordinated, aligned and responsive to financing realities at the country-level as well as the needs of the end-user.
The Reproductive Health Supplies Coalition (RHSC), serving as a trusted and neutral convener for donors and country stakeholders, has commissioned Results for Development (R4D) because of their deep expertise in market shaping and commodity financing, and because R4D is uniquely positioned to curate and disseminate user-friendly resources to improve, diversify and coordinate the use of global and domestic resources for RH and neonatal health supplies. Through established platforms and networks, RHSC and R4D will ensure that relevant resources are widely accessible to maximize impact for country-level decision-makers.
R4D’s Work
With support from RHSC and guidance from an RHSC-convened Financing Technical Advisory Group, R4D will develop a Comprehensive Financing Tool to support country-level decision-makers with essential information and resources to optimize and diversify financing for RH and neonatal health supplies. Specifically, R4D will:
- Map eligibility requirements and processes for global financing and co-financing mechanisms for maternal and neonatal health, family planning and menstrual health
- Identify domestic financing mechanisms and their associated preconditions, or enabling factors, for effective use for the three priority health areas
- Develop a simple, user-friendly tool combining information gathered on global and domestic financing mechanisms alongside country-level guidance and recommendations for leveraging mechanisms for maximum impact
- Outline a methodology for countries to track financing flows from origin to disbursement to improve transparency and identify areas for improvement
- Create a suite of case studies highlighting examples of countries successfully utilizing global financing mechanisms alongside domestic resource mobilization plus resources with adaptable messaging for country-level advocacy and communications
The Comprehensive Financing Tool – inclusive of all the resources described above – will be combined in an easily accessible and user-friendly format, piloted in up to three countries and made publicly available on the RHSC website. By piloting and broadly disseminating the Comprehensive Financing Tool, RHSC and R4D will enable country decision-makers to unlock and coordinate new funding streams, ultimately strengthening access to essential reproductive and neonatal health supplies in low-resource settings.
Photo © Reproductive Health Supplies Coalition
