Researching how the global health system can work better.

The Global Health Governance Project was established in 2006 to foster research and debate into how the global health system can better serve the needs of people in developing countries. The three core objectives of the project are:

• to conduct and foster research into global health organizations and markets as well as new public-private governance regimes;
• to create and maintain a network of scholars and policy-makers working on these issues through the Oxford Global Health Network;
• to influence debate and policy in both the public and the private sector in developed and developing countries.

The Project is located within the Global Economic Governance Programme, Department of Politics and International Relations. It is linked with Oxford’s Departments of Public Health and Primary Health Care and the Centre for Tropical Medicine. It serves as an interdisciplinary umbrella within Oxford drawing together members of the Departments of Economics, Anthropology, Law, Business, and Development Studies working on these issues and linking them to an international research network. The first phase of the project is principally funded by the John Fell Fund (Oxford).

The Politics, Priorities and Finance of Global Health

There are several research streams in this research project:
(1) Global Health Institutions: Financing, Accountability and Governance
(2) Priority-Setting within Global Health Institutions and within Developing Countries
(3) Explaining Variations in Cooperation and Non-Cooperation in Health
(4) Global Health Assistance: Ownership in Global Health

High-Level Working Group on Setting a Developing Country Agenda for Global Health

Bringing together current and former health and finance ministers from developing countries, this is an exclusively developing country working group, and the first meeting of this kind in which donors are not present. The aims of the Working Group are to identify:

(1) Developing country priorities in global health, and areas of divergence and convergence in priorities of national and global health institutions.
(2) Challenges and successes in interactions between national and global institutions in the areas of health policy and health financing.
(3) Urgent areas for reform in funding, technical support and partnerships for global health.
(4) Issues which need further examination by policy-makers and scholars, and an identification of venues for moving this discussion and research forward.

The Working Group convened in Oxford in May 2008. Over the course of the meeting, participants voiced their frustrations with the current state of health assistance. Within countries, health policy-makers already face strong incentives to prioritize clinical care and infectious diseases and to under-fund prevention and wider inter-sectoral health issues such as access for the poor to health services, maternal mortality, tobacco-related illnesses, and carcinoma. Crucially, national health strategies need to aim at stronger health systems. However, far from helping to correct this imbalance, donors are exacerbating and magnifying it.

The meeting and the preliminary report highlighted three issues for urgent reform. First, there are too many new initiatives; donors need to learn to ‘stay the course.’ Second, national strategies are being weakened by parallel priorities and implementation directed by donors. Third, there is too little transparency and information about aid activities; donors must learn to report fully to developing countries.

Partnerships

The Health Project is a collaboration of three Oxford departments:

Department of Politics and International Relations

Oxford Department of Public Health and Primary Care
Researchers: Professor Harold Jaffe and Professor Ray Fitzpatrick

Oxford Centre for Tropical Medicine
Researchers: Professor Nick White and Dr. Shunmay Yeung