LSTM, in partnership with the Tropical Health Education Trust (THET), has launched the UK Partnerships for Health Systems (UKPHS) programme.
UKPHS is a £30 million project over the next four years, which will award both large grants for strategic Health Partnership (HP) activities and smaller grants for innovation and scale-up of HP activities across 10 African and Asian countries: Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Ghana, Myanmar, Nepal, Sierra Leone, Somalia/Somaliland, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia.
COVID-19 grants will also be awarded through the UKPHS programme to established HPs working in any low and lower-middle income countries (LMIC) in Sub-Saharan Africa or Asia to strengthen the prevention, treatment and management of COVID-19.
The UKPHS programme aims to contribute to SDG 3: ensuring healthier lives and promotion of well-being for all at all ages, including supporting countries to achieve universal health coverage (UHC). A key outcome of the programme will be stronger, high-quality and resilient health systems and improved health service and health worker performance that responds to service users’ - women, girls, men, boys and people of other genders - needs and preferences, particularly the poorest unreached and underserved populations, whilst ensuring new evidence and learning generated informs policy and practice.
LSTM is facilitating scoping assessments and consulting and engaging health policy makers and key national stakeholders in each of the 10 countries to determine the Health Systems Strengthening priorities that Health Partnerships are best placed to address. As Margaret Caffrey, the LSTM Lead on the UKPHS explains: “This stakeholder engagement process is key to relationship building and country ownership, to enable the exploration and analysis of health systems issues, challenges and priorities within national contexts, with a Gender Equality and Social Inclusion (GESI) lens, and to determine how health partnerships can be leveraged to effectively address nationally identified health systems priorities.”
With the first call for applications for Large Grants now open, grants will be awarded to partnerships working in Myanmar, Nepal, Uganda and Zambia through a competitive bidding process, managed by THET and LSTM.
LSTM will provide technical expertise on the health systems strengthening (HSS), gender equality and social inclusion (GESI) and monitoring, evaluation and learning (MEL) components of the programme. LSTM’s Margaret Caffrey explains: “We are very excited to have this opportunity to apply the LSTM teams’ extensive experience of partnerships across Africa and Asia to support the design and delivery of innovative, impactful and sustainable HPs that can effectively respond to national health systems strengthening priorities across all health systems components and ‘building blocks’, whilst focusing on GESI and quality, and ultimately contribute to UHC, health security and resilience.”
The LSTM team also includes Professor Sally Theobald, Tim Martineau, Dr Jo Raven, and Dr Rosemary Morgan from Johns Hopkins University.
You can find more information, and details on how to apply, here.