Thanzi la Onse (Health for All) Mission Statement
All healthcare systems face a difficult conundrum: the health needs within the country can be vast, but funding for health care provision is often not adequate to meet them. In countries with particularly constrained budgets, such as Malawi and Uganda, the process of allocating limited budgets to address competing health care obligations and needs is particularly challenging, involving difficult choices among many healthcare interventions and opportunities. When resources are scarce, the consequences of getting these decisions wrong are potentially severe in terms of forgone benefits and often growing inequalities.
The GCRF-funded Thanzi la Onse Health of All (TLO) programme provides high quality research, frameworks and tools to support the prioritisation of resources in low-income settings and enhance the efficiency and equity of health care provision with the ultimate goal of improving population health. Bringing together world-leading experts in health economics, epidemiological modelling and political science, the programme has pioneered new approaches for evidence generation over the last four years; developing innovative model frameworks, methods and tools to assess the disease burden within LMIC settings and inform health care decision making.
Ground-breaking capability building initiatives have also been delivered, through the generation of new and locally-relevant research evidence alongside upskilling TLO’s key research areas among policymakers and local academic experts.
Research-Policy Partnerships
Led by an interdisciplinary network of collaborators based in the UK, Malawi, Uganda and the wider East, Central and Southern Africa region, the TLO programme has become a leading model for high quality research and has championed research-to-policy engagement.
Through its commitment to collaboration and partnerships with ministries of health, health organisations and national universities across Southern and East Africa, the programme has generated a two-way benefit: enabling researchers to generate evidence to support decision-making and allowing policymakers to shape the research being produced. This new, exciting approach and commitment to research-policy engagement has led to the development of a number of initiatives and research outputs within the TLO portfolio, which respond directly to the challenges voiced by decision-makers in the region (read more on pages 4-6), including the facilitation of knowledge-sharing and capability building initiatives, to enhance training and research capacity in Sub-Saharan Africa (read more on pages 8-9).
Future Ambitions
This commitment to high-quality research, capacity development and policy engagement to ensure value for money health care will support low-income countries in taking greater control over the health policies and guidelines implemented in their own setting (a move which is supported by the World Health Organisation) and has attracted further interest from other African nations, who are keen to explore how this approach can be applied in other settings. Read on to learn more about the speciffic initiatives and outputs which have been delivered by TLO collaborators.