Deadline: 30 March 2018
The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is issuing this Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) to seek participants to co-create, co-develop, co-invest, and collaborate on research and development interventions to identify new approaches for improving health system performance, which move past traditional approaches and include new ways to ensure knowledge management of advances in the field.
USAID wants to align goals with the partners under this BAA to co-invest and facilitate shared responsibility, shared risk, and shared resourcing. Shared resourcing requires that cash and other resources, both tangible and intangible, such as in-kind contributions, expertise, intellectual property, brand value, high-value coordination, and access to key people, places, and information, are directed towards reaching the solution to the Problem/Challenge.
Problems
- Health systems weaknesses create a significant barrier impeding the ability of low- and middle income countries to transition from USAID assistance in health and achieve lasting health outcomes. Many countries struggle to provide accessible, equitable, quality, essential services and medicines that respond to the needs of their populations. Many preventable deaths continue to occur due to persistent systems challenges at the national and sub-national level. While country health systems should be able to provide high quality services, many are generally poorly resourced, inefficient, and ill-equipped to deliver those services.
- A health systems strengthening approach built around strengthening individual health system building blocks has contributed greatly to their understanding of the components and conditions that constitute a well-functioning health system. The building block approach provided the international community with a fundamental way to address the topic of health systems strengthening and to promote its importance within a predominantly disease control and mortality-reduction construct to addressing health development challenges. In short, it enabled a common understanding of what is health systems strengthening? However, this approach alone lacks systems thinking and does not provide a clear and robust capacity development path for achieving sustainable health systems.
- As the global landscape evolves, USAID’s Health Systems Strengthening (HSS) activities must continue not only to respond to the changing development environment, but proactively shape the global agenda in health systems as well. Future investments in HSS need to follow a systems-thinking approach designed to improve health systems outcomes in support of more sustainable and robust overall health results.
- In the increasingly global health community, the systemic health problems the world faces reach beyond national boundaries, and require increasing levels of collaboration and innovative thinking in order to solve them. The global health community has achieved stronger health system performance through better evidence and shared knowledge for policy-making, improved open-source technology, and improved approaches to collectively address communicable disease. USAID is a technical leader contributing to the generation, dissemination, and uptake of “global public goods” that extend benefits to all countries, all people, and across generations by increasing financial sustainability and accountability, enhancing quality and responsiveness, and delivering better health outcomes.
Eligibility Criteria
- Public, private, for-profit, and nonprofit organizations, as well as institutions of higher education, public international organizations, non-governmental organizations, U.S. and non-U.S. governmental organizations, multilateral and international donor organizations are eligible under this BAA.
- All organizations must be determined to be responsive to the BAA and sufficiently responsible to perform or participate in the final award type.
For more information, please visit Grants.gov.
