New Global Financing Facility in Support of Every Woman Every Child

The Business Plan to operationalize the Global Financing Facility in support of Every Woman Every Child (GFF) is now available online.

Background
Announced at the UN General Assembly in September 2014, the GFF will bring to bear smart, scaled and sustainable financing designed to achieve and measure results, and help prevent maternal and child deaths in 63 high-burden countries by 2030. 

The GFF intends to serve as a major vehicle for financing the proposed Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) on healthy lives and play a special role in scaling up financing to support the UN Secretary-General’s renewed “Global Strategy for Women’s, Children’s and Adolescents’ Health”.

Partnership and Collaboration
The newly developed business plan is the result of seven months of work by a 54-member Business Planning Team and the GFF Oversight Group, which provided feedback and strategic guidance throughout the process, including inputs from the GFF front-runner country governments (Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Kenya and Tanzania).

The Business plan clearly states that GFF will be based on the International Health Partnership (IHP+) principles, and at the briefing session on GFA during WHA, the Ethiopian health minister emphasized that the GFF support to Ethiopia would be based on their new national strategy which were being assessed through an IHP+ JANS. Others also emphasized the importance of GFF actually adhering to IHP+ principles for example Simon Wright, Head of Child Survival, Save the Children, tweeted this during the session: “Why not use #IHPplus principles and mechanisms”. 

Next Steps
The World Bank-hosted GFF Trust Fund aims to raise $2.6 billion for initial grants to leverage additional resources to scale up health services for women and children, and help countries build and strengthen their Civil Registration and Vital Statistics systems. 

As partners rally around priorities in the four front-runner countries, work is underway to select the next group of 5-10 countries from among the 32 accounting for 88 percent of all child and maternal deaths globally. 

 

The GFF will be officially launched in July 2015, at the Financing for Development Conference, in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.