Publications

African countries are committed to and have made huge investments aimed at moving to- wards universal health coverage (UHC). Reliable information on health financing and trends is crucial in that it underpins monitoring, decision-making and efficient use of funds. It is even more important in the context of the shifts generated by the COVID-19 pandemic, the project- ed reduction in economic growth and the need to ensure transparency. For the last two de- cades, WHO has supported countries to undertake health expenditure tracking and produce national health accounts (NHA) reports. Despite considerable efforts made to institutionalize production, the process, which mainly uses specifically designed surveys to collect data, is still costly. Country ownership, use of domestic resources to fund NHA production and use of NHA data to inform policy decisions are still suboptimal. There is need to address bottlenecks for effective institutionalization of NHA in many countries of the WHO African Region.