The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation (DDCF) is to provide $100 million over five to seven years to African-led partnerships working on innovative strategies to overcome barriers to integrated primary healthcare delivery.
Grants will be awarded to create Population Health Implementation and Training (PHIT) Partnerships to implement strategies to significantly reduce mortality and morbidity in African districts of at least 250,000 people; identify and address health systems weaknesses and funding gaps; and conduct vital implementation research to be shared with the larger health service community.
“Although funding for health in Africa has increased significantly in recent years, simple, inexpensive interventions like deworming children and providing insecticide-treated bed nets are still unavailable to many people because health systems do not function properly,” noted Elaine Gallin, Ph.D, Program Director for Medical Research at DDCF.
“This initiative seeks to catalyse a change in approach to strengthening health systems, away from disease-specific funding and toward integrated models that significantly expand access to primary healthcare in Africa.”
PHIT Partnerships will bring together experts in health service delivery, research and workforce training, along with representatives of African government, academia, NGOs, faith-based organisations and the communities served. The foundation will also encourage PHIT Partnerships to include the private health and business sectors.
“The foundation does not seek to build new health service delivery projects from the ground up, but rather to increase the efficiency of existing programmes and fill critical gaps in funding,” said Dr Gallin. “While funded partnerships will develop their own approaches to the challenges of strengthening health systems, each will employ rigorous implementation research to systematically improve health services.”
Depending on local needs, grants may be used for a variety of activities, such as training health workers, conducting disease surveillance, creating new health systems management tools or coordinating between vertical disease programs. DDCF also expects to support a portfolio of smaller projects to complement PHIT Partnership activities, such as the development of shared tools, as well as a ‘network’ grant to foster collaboration among AHI participants.
The foundation is currently accepting letters of interest from potential PHIT Partnerships.
Selected teams will be invited to submit planning grant proposals for up to $150,000 each, and in early 2009 the foundation expects to award three to six multi-year implementation grants of $8 million to $20 million each.
Teams working in Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Mozambique, Rwanda, Tanzania and Zambia are eligible to apply for funding. The list of eligible countries was developed through extensive discussions with experts and is designed to include a range of countries where successful scale-up models might be developed that could be adapted elsewhere on the continent.
Letters of intent are due by November 15th 2007, and further information on the African Health Initiative can be found at the Doris Duke Foundation website, at ">http://www.ddcf.org/page.asp?pageId=720