Ownership in Name, But not Necessarily in Action Comment on "It's About the Idea Hitting the Bull's Eye": How Aid Effectiveness Can Catalyse the Scale-up of Health Innovations".

Melisa Martinez-Alvarez

doi:10.15171/ijhpm.2018.72

Abstract

A recently-published paper by Wickremasinghe et al assesses the scalability of pilot projects in three countries using the aid effectiveness agenda as an analytical framework. The authors report uneven progress and recommend applying aid effectiveness principles to improve the scalability of projects. This commentary focuses on one key principle of aid effectiveness – country ownership; it describes difficulties in defining and achieving it, and provides practical steps donors and recipient governments can take to move forward towards country ownership.

Highlights

A recently-published paper by Wickremasinghe et al analyses the scalability of three maternal health programs in three different countries using the aid effectiveness agenda as an analytical framework to explore constraints and facilitating factors to programme scalability.[1]
The results show that the different aid effectiveness principles were adopted to different degrees in the three settings, and that this had an impact on programme scale-up
The authors conclude that donors, implementers and recipient governments all need to adhere to aid effectiveness principles to increase the scalability of interventions

Summary

Introduction

A recently-published paper by Wickremasinghe et al analyses the scalability of three maternal health programs in three different countries using the aid effectiveness agenda as an analytical framework to explore constraints and facilitating factors to programme scalability.[1]. Donors and recipient governments need to make meaningful changes to their approach to managing external and domestic funds in the health sector in order to achieve country ownership, which is relevant in light of current demands for increased domestic spending on health.[2]

Results

Conclusion