The Malawi Government through the Ministry of Health has launched the 3rd edition of Malawi Health Sector Strategic Plan (HSSP).
This is a multi-year strategy to guide the Ministry’s way of delivering health care from January, 2023 to December, 2030.
Speaking at the launch, Minister of Health Khumbize Kandodo Chiponda said the Ministry is going to use the HSSP for the next 8 years up to 2030 and the plan has been aligned to the Malawi 2063 vision.
“We looked at where we are coming from, what is it that we have achieved, what are the challenges and then trying to address them to see how can we move forward. So there are several areas which we looked at. There is service delivery issue and the main one where we tried to make sure that when somebody goes to a clinic or health centre, they should find all the services,” explained Chiponda.
According to Chiponda, they also looked at issues of governance and leadership and now they are going to have one plan and one budget.
She noted that the Ministry of Health has many partners who support the ministry or the health sector and at times there were many strategies and many things being implemented which made it difficult for the ministry to follow up or monitor.
“So, now when we have one plan, it means all government resources and all the resources from our partners as well are going to be put together and then address our priorities,” said Chiponda.
She added that they have also launched a health financing strategy where they are looking at the resource envelope.
“We have been talking about it that all the time we don’t have enough resources, but we are saying what is it extra that we can do in order that we put more in our resources so that we can give better service delivery as we are trying to achieve the universal health coverage in Malawi,” explained Chiponda.
Representing health donor group in Malawi, Kelsey Mirkovic from Centre for Disease Control (CDC) applauded the Government of Malawi for efforts in seeing the strategic plan through, saying the health sector strategic approach brings in all of the sectors into a single plan with one unified budget and one unified monitoring and evaluation system.
“What is so important about a plan like this from the donor side is that we are able to feed into something that has gaps and we are able to make sure that resources are being aligned across the donors and also making sure resources are being used efficiently,” said Mirkovic.
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