All healthcare systems face a difficult conundrum:
The health needs within the country can be vast, but funding for health care is often inadequate to meet them. In low-and-middle-income countries (LMICs) in Africa, such as Malawi and Uganda, making decisions on how to allocate limited healthcare budgets can be particularly challenging: relevant evidence suitable for the context is often limited, requiring difficult choices to be made between healthcare interventions on a daily basis.
Thanzi la Onse (2017 - 2022)
The Thanzi la Onse (Health of All) project was founded in 2017 with funding from the UKRI’s Global Challenges Research Fund as an interdisciplinary partnership of health research and policy partners based in the UK, Malawi, Uganda and Southern and East Africa. Our work championed research-to-policy collaboration: facilitating open conversations between academics and policy makers to ensure research is designed to support and strengthen health resource decision making in low-income settings in Africa.
Working closely with national and regional health research and policy communities across Southern and East Africa, Thanzi partners focussed on three core ‘pillars’ of work: launching innovative research frameworks; research-to-policy engagement platforms, and capability strengthening tools to generate better and more relevant evidence and support the uptake of this evidence into policy.
This collaborative approach resulted in a two-way benefit for both parties: enabling research to be informed by local user needs, and supporting upskilling for policymakers and researchers through knowledge sharing platforms.
Even more importantly, the use of our tools and frameworks has enabled policy decision makers to take greater control over the health policies within their country's context (a move which is supported by the World Health Organisation). This collegiate and equitable approach to research generation has led to the launch of several legacy making projects, to support health decision making in other low-income country settings in Africa into the future.
Thanzi Programme (2022 - present)
The Thanzi Programme was launched in 2022, representing multiple projects focussed on improving population health in LMICs. Building on the successes of the Thanzi la Onse project, these projects extend Thanzi’s 3-pillar approach to strengthen health systems and working partnerships between national research and policy partners across the East, Central, Southern and West Africa regions.
In 2023, Thanzi collaborated with AUDA-NEPAD to deliver an interdisciplinary event, to agree how our research can contribute to the commitments set-out by the African Union’s African Leadership Meeting Declaration (ALM Declaration). These conversations are helping to strengthen and enhance more efficient domestic health financing in Africa.
Read more about Thanzi’s core pillars of activity
We generate novel, context-relevant and locally-driven research evidence in the fields of health economics and health system modelling.
We facilitate greater collaboration between researchers and policymakers in Africa, to ensure that research is co-designed to address local health needs and inform real world health decision making.
We build knowledge sharing and training platforms to enhance long term health economics capacity and support career pathways for researchers and policymakers in Africa.