Introduction
Growing attention to health challenges, particularly those facing low- and middle-income countries, has led to the emergence of new global institutions, especially in the past twenty-five years. Today, the global health architecture includes a number of diverse international organizations with different mandates, governance models, financing structures, and operational approaches. At the same time, several of these organizations support the same countries, address similar health issues, and rely on the same set of revenue sources. As such, questions have been raised about whether there is duplication and/or opportunity for synergies and better coordination across entities. These questions have become even more acute as fiscal environments have increasingly tightened, and many international institutions have been forced to scale back operations. As a result, multiple reform efforts, including the Lusaka Agenda, the Accra Reset, the WHO’s Joint Process on Reform of the Global Health Architecture, and others, , have been launched to explore these questions.
As reform efforts intensify, the global health community has identified the importance of developing a more structured mapping across institutions (and efforts are underway to do so, including by the Multilateral Organization Performance Assessment Network (MOPAN) ). As another input into these processes, KFF has developed a descriptive mapping of 14 key global health and related international institutions, with a focus on their work to address health challenges in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). By looking across a range of variables, it is intended to inform discussions about synergies and coordination, duplication, comparative advantage, shared challenges, and architectural reform, although it is not meant to represent an assessment of organizational performance or effectiveness. More broadly, any mapping of the global health institutional ecosystem, including this one, offers only a snapshot within what is a rapidly changing environment.
Full web version of report to come.
