Priority-Setting

With a number of African countries confirming their first cases of COVID-19 and the continent bracing for major outbreaks, health system resilience and basic functionality emerge once again as the determining factor for a successful response.

Governments are under continuous pressure to make difficult trade-offs about the use of scarce public resources. This applies to the budget as a whole, but also within sectors like health. 

As countries reaffirm their commitments to achieving Universal Health Coverage, governments face extraordinary pressure to allocate scarce resources in a publicly justifiable manner. The growing list of available health interventions and increasing demand for health services mean that toug...

Pamela Gongora-Salazar, a former ministry of health official in Colombia, shares her account of how health taxes happen (or don’t) in the real world.