Uganda Health Activity

The Challenge

Although Uganda’s health indicators have improved, implementation of family health high impact interventions at all levels of the health system are suboptimal and social norms and trust in the health system vary within subregions. The country’s new National Community Health Strategy provides an opportunity to strengthen Uganda’s community health services, staffed primarily by unpaid and overburdened volunteers. Barriers to quality of care include quality improvement approaches that are top-down and poorly utilized for family health services. Gender and social norms inhibit access to quality services, especially for vulnerable groups.

Overview and Objectives

The USAID Uganda Health Activity (UHA) will accelerate inclusive access to respectful, people-centered care for Ugandan families, propel the country across the finish line for sustainable HIV epidemic control, and ensure that family health and HIV interventions and outcomes are anchored in strong local health systems that use data to drive results and efficiently manage human, institutional, and financial resources.

URC and its partners will support Uganda to bridge the divide between national policymaking and local action by:

• Transforming existing human resources for health (HRH) at the community, facility, district, and regional levels into proponents, managers, and providers of respectful, people-centered care
• Bolstering the political stewardship, local ownership, private sector engagement (PSE), multi-sectoral collaboration, and community participation to achieve equity, sustainability, and accountability
• Introducing governance and health systems strengthening (HSS) interventions across 72 health districts in seven diverse sub-regions to ensure that local health service delivery (HSD) networks, through Uganda’s hub and spoke model, improve their performance and management systems to equitably deliver cost-effective, high quality health services in their catchment areas
• Saturating 30 of these districts with a robust program of direct HSD support that improves access to, demand for, and use of quality family health services at the community and facility levels