Planning Allocations for Value for Money: My First Webinar

Earlier this month, the African Development Bank held its first capacity building program on value for money in social service delivery in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, following the Tunis Declaration on value for money signed by some 50 African Ministers of Finance and health on July 5, 2012.

For this capacity-building program, I was privileged to participate as a speaker in a session on trade-offs in allocation – by virtual pre-recorded webinar (see video here and slides here).

My presentation reflected the chapter on Planning Allocations in CGD’s recent report, More Health for the Money. While our report’s recommendations were addressed to the Global Fund, they could be adopted by any funding agency including a national government.

The summary points of our chapter, addressed to a global-health funder, are to:

(1)    Choose the most effective and cost-effective interventions and commodities;

(2)    Focus on hot spots and key modes of transmission of an epidemic;

(3)    Improve budgeting and its transparency to reduce duplication among actors; and

(4)    Optimize the mix of interventions subnationally using epidemiologic and economic intelligence (see also this blog post on the importance of disease modeling).

Frankly it was my first webinar, and I feel a bit shy revealing my disembodied voice. What do you think? Do you agree or disagree with our recommendations? Are more pre-recorded webinars like this worthwhile, and should we do more of them for the other chapters of our report? Feedback welcomed!

Victoria Fan is a research fellow and health economist at the Center for Global Development. She thanks Nejmudin Bilal of AfDB for this opportunity, Amanda Glassman for helpful comments and Jenny Ottenhoff, Aaron King, and the CGD IT team for making the webinar possible. You can follow Victoria Fan on Twitter at @FanVictoria.