Universal health coverage (UHC), which implies all people have access to needed services without the risk of financial ruin, has become a major goal for health reform in many countries. Fiji and Timor Leste are currently seeking to modify their financing systems so they can move more quickly to UHC and to maintain it once it has been achieved.  Taking a ‘systems wide’ approach, that includes both public and private sectors, the SHIFT team will  provide much needed evidence on the current equity of health-system financing and service use in these countries. This will primarily be…

In the past decade, massive scale-up of insecticide-treated nets (ITN) and indoor residual spraying (IRS), together with the introduction of artemisinin-combination treatments, have led to substantial reductions in malaria prevalence and incidence in African highlands. However, rising insecticide resistance and increased outdoor transmission have greatly hampered the effectiveness of ITN and IRS because the current indoor-based interventions do not target the outdoor-biting mosquitoes. Consequently, most highland sites maintain sustained low-level transmission while some others have…

The pursuit of universal health care coverage needs to be informed by an understanding of how equitable the current health financing arrangements are. The financing mechanism is equitable if:

• The burden of health care payments is distributed in line with ability to pay. 
• The benefits from healthcare spending are distributed according to need for health services.

This study represents the first attempt to quantify financing and benefit incidence for the entire health system of Cambodia. Benefit and financing incidence analyses can be very useful…