Seasoned Ifakara Health Institute researcher, Dr. Fatuma Manzi, is leading a team of scientists from the Health Systems, Impact Evaluation and Policy department at Ifakara facilitating a national dialogue designed to impact on strategic health purchasing in Tanzania. The dialogue last two days: from March 17-18, 2022 in Morogoro.

The policy dialogue is tag-lined “Progress, Challenges and Way Forward”, and is designed to leverage explicit health benefit packages to the population; explicit contracting; output-based financing; and getting funding to frontline providers - as powerful strategic purchasing tools for accelerating universal health coverage in Tanzania.

Ifakara Health Institute hosts the dialogue in collaboration with the University of Dar es Salaam (UDSM) and the Strategic Purchasing Africa Resource Centre (SPARC), with funding and technical support from Results for Development (R4D).

About SPARC
Strategic Purchasing Africa Resource Centre (SPARC) is a new initiative to strengthen strategic purchasing expertise in sub-Saharan Africa and move countries closer to universal health coverage, launched by Results for Development (R4D) in partnership with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Housed within Amref Health Africa, SPARC will match country demand with needed technical expertise by brokering tailored packages of strategic purchasing support.

Learn more here.

About R4D
R4d believes in order to achieve large-scale and lasting impact in health, education and nutrition, the work must be driven by country leaders. That’s why it puts change agents — government officials, civil society leaders and social innovators — at the center of R4D mission.

Working alongside country leaders, they help them untangle the complexities of long-term systems change; they support them to diagnose root causes of challenges, co-create locally relevant solutions informed by global knowledge, take actionable steps to drive change, and engage in learning to adapt and continuously improve. And they share what they learn so others around the world can achieve results for development too.

Learn more here.

About UDSM
The University of Dar es Salaam is a public university in Tanzania. It was established in 1961 as an affiliate college of the University of London. The university became an affiliate of the University of East Africa in 1963, shortly after Tanzania gained its independence from the United Kingdom.

The main campus, called Mlimani, is home to the basic faculties of education, arts and social science, and science. In addition, four specialist faculties – informatics and virtual education, law, commerce and management, and aquatic science and technology – have been established there.

Learn more here.