Useful Resources

The ICD is the international standard diagnostic classification for all general epidemiological, many health management purposes and clinical use. These include the analysis of the general health situation of population groups and monitoring of the incidence and prevalence of diseases and other health problems in relation to other variables such as the characteristics and circumstances of the individuals affected, reimbursement, resource allocation, quality and guidelines. It is used to classify diseases and other health problems recorded on many types of health and vital records including death certificates and health records. In addition to enabling the storage and retrieval of diagnostic information for clinical, epidemiological and quality purposes, these records also provide the basis for the compilation of national mortality and morbidity statistics by WHO Member States.

This tool is a portal that is intended to provide public health practitioners with all the necessary information they need on the social determinants of health (SDH). ACTION:SDH houses knowledge on the SDH and provides a platform for discussion of action on the SDH. The World Health Organisation (WHO) invites everyone in the SDH community to register on ACTION:SDH. WHO is also actively seeking partners interested in collaborating in building up the tool, together with its users. There are three main features: embedded web-pages pages on SDH knowledge relevant to the five action areas for SDH that were identified in the Rio Declaration of October 2011; discussion forums that can be used to share tacit knowledge from practice - either by invitation only, or open to all members; and a document repository that initially is housing selected WHO materials on SDH. Other standard website features also exist, such as an area for advertising upcoming training (Campus) and upcoming meetings (Events).

Most international external funders (external funders) are not publishing enough information about the money they give, undermining the effectiveness of development spending and damaging public trust, according to Publish What You Fund’s 2011 Aid Transparency Index. Major external funders - including the United States, Japan, France, Germany, Spain, Norway, Canada, Italy and Australia - perform poorly in the Index, despite repeated pledges to improve. The five best-ranked donors (external funders) are the World Bank, the Global Fund, the African Development Bank, the Netherlands’ Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development. Publish What You Fund has expressed disappointment with the results, noting that most external funders are simply not providing enough good information about their aid. It argues that this lack of transparency leads to waste, overlap and inefficiency, impedes efforts to improve governance and reduce corruption and makes it hard to measure results. Publish What You Fund calls on all external funders to sign up to and implement the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI), which provides a common standard for publishing data and has the potential to transform the way external funding is managed. It urges external funders to use the upcoming High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Korea (29 November – 1 December 2011) to commit to publish timely, comprehensive and comparable information on external funding by 2015.

Improving knowledge management in health systems is a priority of the platform Harmonization for Health in Africa (HHA). Building commonly shared knowledge is at the core of the philosophy of communities of practice. Those within the financing pillar - namely, "Performance-based financing", "Financial Access", "Public-Private Partnerships" and "Evidence-based Budgeting and Planning" are particularly active.
In recent months, their facilitators have found that some lively CoP debates are of broader interest and should be made accessible more widely. This blog was created as a platform to meet this need, to give greater visibility to our CoPs and contribute to consolidating their role and voice in health financing in Africa, to become the reference point for discussions on health financing in Africa.