About Harmonization for Health in Africa

The AfDB, JICA, NORAD, UNAIDS, UNFPA, UNICEF, WHO, USAID and the WB established a mechanism to support country-led efforts at health system strengthening leading to the accelerated attainment of health outcomes particularly the MDGs. This mechanism—known as Harmonization for Health in Africa (HHA) is consolidating itself as the operational and capacity building support modality to countries and development partners to support the agenda of Health Systems for Outcomes (HSO).

HHA works in the context of the new global initiative for strengthening health systems, such as the International Health Partnership (IHP+), the Catalytic Initiative and the Global Campaign for the Health MDGs.

HHA was conceived as a regional mechanism through which collaborating partners agree to focus on providing support to governments in Africa on particularly in the areas of Health Financing-including Evidence Based Budgeting, Results Based Financing and Health Insurance- Human Resources for Health, Pharmaceuticals and Supply chains, Governance , Service Delivery, Monitoring and Evaluation and Infrastructure and ICT.

HHA supports several Communities of Practices (COP’s), one for each of the WHO health systems pillars. Each COP is supported full time by a partner agency of HHA and membership is comprised of a select group of relevant experts and decision makers from governments, donors and academia.

These African Communities of Practice are virtual institutions using all the opportunities of the new ICT tools to bring expertise together and create a structured environment where requests for Technical Assistance and Documents and Tools can be made and responded to, and where expert knowledge related the specific CoP topics can be shared with relevant counterparts. These COPs ensure that government or donor requests for assistance never go unheard and efficiently reach the most relevant people.