The Governance, Equity and Health (GEH) initiative, a partnership between the Swiss Agency for Development (SDC) and the Canadian International Development Research Centre (IDRC), aims to contribute to a shift in thinking and practice among researchers and research-users so that political and governance challenges, equity concerns and technical health and health policy questions are increasingly considered as integrally related. The goal of the programme is to contribute to more informed, effective and equitable policy making and service delivery for health, by promoting increased citizen participation in addressing health priorities and by actively advocating for evidence-based decision making. This process is guided by promoting a holistic analysis and appreciation of health challenges, by supporting researchers in the South to produce solid evidence and by actively contributing to bringing evidence a step closer to policy and practice.
Since the 2004 Mexican Ministerial Summit on Health research and three years after the approval of the first GEH prospectus and the Phase-I of SDC support to the initiative (2002-2006), health systems and health systems research are much higher on the global health and development agendas. Yet GEH remains one of the very few sources of funding and technical support available to Southern research teams for developing and implementing the research and knowledge translation agendas arising from this renewed global interest.
In Phase I, the initiative showed that its main goal does address a key challenge and that it answers a clear demand. Numerous representatives of partner organisations such as the
Council on Health Research for Development (COHRED),
Global Forum for Health Research (GFHR), WHO,
Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) in the field and in headquarters have welcomed this initiative and have expressed their support with regard to the objectives and strategy of the programme. An external evaluation of the GEH programme in 2005 confirmed the paramount importance of the GEH programme and the “Research Matters” (RM) project in particular. In concert they fill the clear need expressed by the partners and headquarters for more
evidence to inform its own decision making and to support respective partners in making the most appropriate decisions. The RM project as part of the wider GEH programme focuses specifically on addressing the challenge of
"closing-the-loop" between research /evidence and decision making/ implementation by actively playing a
brokering role between researchers and research-users. This has been of the particular interest and support of SDC and has often been described as the "piece of the puzzle that was missing" in the GEH overall programme. RM concentrates its efforts in identifying research gaps/needs, pushing GEH evidence closer to policy dialogue and supporting GEH researchers in communicating their results. GEH/RM's work with the Gov of Tanzania, Mozambique as well as GEH/RM influence on the scaling up of anti-retroviral therapy in South Africa or the Board of GFATM are a few success-stories of the IDRC-SDC partnership on GEH. After Phase-I, SDC is ever more convinced that RM is the necessary complement to the wider GEH initiative and outside partners and that the vision that was developed at the initial phase of the programme was relevant.
