May 29, 2015
The Business Plan to operationalize the Global Financing Facility in Support of Every Woman Every Child (GFF) is now available online. Announced at the UN General Assembly in September 2014, the GFF will bring to bear smart, scaled and sustainable financing designed to achieve and measure results, and help prevent up to 3.8 million maternal deaths, 101 million child deaths, and 21 million stillbirths in 63 high-burden countries by 2030. The GFF will serve as a major vehicle for financing the proposed Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) on healthy lives and will play a special role in scaling up financing to support the UN Secretary-General’s renewed “Global Strategy for Women’s, Children’s and Adolescents’ Health”.
The business plan is the result of seven months of work by a 54-member Business Planning Team and the GFF Oversight Group, which provided feedback and strategic guidance throughout the process. The spirit of collaboration and strong partnership—among the GFF front-runner country governments (Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Kenya and Tanzania) and founding donors, civil society, development partners, UN agencies, foundations, and the private sector—is evident in the final document.
The GFF was a key area of focus of EWEC events at the World Health Assembly. A side event co-sponsored by Canada, Norway, the United States, the GFF frontrunner countries and the World Bank. The event provided updates on progress on establishing the GFF including information on how the GFF will leverage resources from all partners to improve health outcomes for women and children. Two GFF frontrunner countries shared their perspectives on diversifying and mobilizing funding for women and children’s health at the country level, including opportunities and lessons learned (see WHO summary of and World Bank presentation from the event).
Next Steps
The World Bank-hosted GFF Trust Fund aims to raise $2.6 billion for initial grants to leverage additional resources to scale up health services for women and children, and help countries build and strengthen their Civil Registration and Vital Statistics systems. As partners rally around priorities in the four front-runner countries, work is underway to select the next group of 5-10 countries from among the 32 accounting for 88 percent of all child and maternal deaths globally. The GFF will be officially launched in July 2015, at the Financing for Development Conference, in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
The Business Plan
http://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/health/brief/global-financing-facility-business-plan
Global Financing Facility in Support of Every Woman Every Child http://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/health/brief/global-financing-facility-in-support-of-every-woman-every-child
Summary of GFF event at World Health Assembly http://who.int/pmnch/media/events/2015/wha/en/index6.html
World Bank Presentation http://www.worldbank.org/content/dam/Worldbank/document/HDN/Health/Tim-Evans-GFF-presentation-WHA-May-2015.pdf
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