Madagascar Leverages Data to Support Advocacy Efforts
Since 2016, HP+ has been working to strengthen the Malagasy government’s capacity to develop, implement, and monitor health policies and strategies designed to improve the equity and sustainability of health services, supplies, and information, with an emphasis on family planning and community health. This year, HP+ aided the country in advancing these objectives by leveraging project-generated data to support advocacy efforts in several ways.
In February, Madagascar became one of the first countries to orient government stakeholders on the new, web-based Costed Implementation Plan (CIP) Performance Dashboard. The dashboard—developed by HP+ and owned by CIP committee members—is a tool that applies a focused approach to allow countries to monitor a set of key CIP results. Using the dashboard, users can visualize the status of a country’s progress toward achieving family planning results, primary outputs, and outcomes. During the most recent CIP semi-annual review meeting in February 2020, HP+ trained 25 multisectoral staff from the Ministry of Public Health’s (MOPH’s) Family Health Directorate and CIP committee members on the dashboard’s use. This important milestone contributes to country ownership of the CIP process and progress toward achieving its goals, including increasing the country’s contraceptive prevalence rate to 50 percent.
A critical component of achieving family planning goals outlined in a CIP is ensuring that sufficient resources are available to support the activities and programs aimed at achieving these goals. In Madagascar, HP+ has been leveraging findings from financial gap analyses to support stakeholders in advocating for increased funding for CIP implementation. Over the past six months, HP+ applied its costing and gap analysis tool using updated data to help the Family Health Directorate better implement the CIP, understand the extent to which activities and strategic areas have been allotted funding, and advocate for future funding to drive achievement of the country’s family planning objectives and larger development goals. Using these data, the director of the Family Health Directorate presented the case for increased funding for CIP activities at a high-level roundtable in March focused on achieving the demographic dividend in Madagascar.
In addition to advancing policies that support family planning initiatives, HP+ has worked to inform evidence-based decision making toward future health financing reforms in Madagascar with the ultimate vision of achieving national universal health coverage. Recently, HP+ built on previous efforts by synthesizing the findings of its health financing system assessment and financial flows analysis, gathering input from 22 MOPH regional directors and summarizing the results in a health system financing diagnostic. At a workshop in March 2020, MOPH staff used the diagnostic as a situational analysis to formulate the vision, objectives, and mission of a national health financing policy—an essential step toward mobilizing resources for health, improving efficacity and efficiency of resource allocation, and advancing on the path toward achieving universal health coverage.
