Making Health Care Accountable - Why performance-based funding of health services in developing countries is getting more attention

This article appeared in the IMF's quarterly magazine Finance & Development in March 2004.
 

Developing countries and their international partners are increasingly adopting methods of financing health care activities in
developing countries that link the availability of funding to concrete, measurable results on the ground. Such “performance-based” financing was advocated a decade ago in the World Bank’s 1993 World Development Report—Investing in Health and other policy documents in the early 1990s, although relatively little practical experience with this type of financing was available. Since then, much experimentation has taken place, and we are seeing with growing clarity the important potential—as well as the challenges—of performance-based financing for achieving national and global health goals.