The governance behaviours: a proposed approach for the alignment of the public and private sectors for better health outcomes.

Health systems are 'the ensemble of all public and private organisations, institutions and resources mandated to improve, maintain or restore health.' The private sector forms a major part of healthcare practice in many health systems providing a wide range of health goods and services, with significant growth across low-income and middle-income countries. WHO sees building stronger and more effective health systems through the participation and engagement of all health stakeholders as the pathway to further reducing the burden of disease and meeting health targets and the Sustainable Development Goals.

Engaging the private sector to deliver quality maternal and newborn health services for universal health coverage: lessons from policy dialogues.

The private health sector is becoming increasingly important in discussions on improving the quality of care for maternal and newborn health (MNH). Yet information rarely addresses what engaging the private sector for MNH means and how to do it. In 2019, the Network for Improving Quality of Care for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health (the Network) initiated exploratory research to better understand how to ensure that the private sector delivers quality care and what the public sector must do to facilitate and sustain this process.

Incentives and disincentives to private sector reporting on family planning in Kenya: .

This study sought to understand private sector reporting on family planning in Kenya's health information system (KHIS). We approached this through three lenses: governance, procedural and technical. Our study looked at these areas of interest in Kenya, complemented by deeper exploration in Nairobi County.

National ownership of family planning: What do FP2020 commitments have to do with it?

In 2020, we reached a family planning (FP) temporal milestone. This paper seeks to understand the political economy of commitments and normative best practice within FP national programs, contributing to "stock taking" of change objectives for national ownership and domestic financing of FP programs post FP2020. Stock taking is needed to understand, for example, do we expect our current approaches to deliver greater commitment or do we need to change our approach? Is time the limiting factor for FP2020 commitments or are other, contextual, mechanistic and implementation factors more critical? This paper uses mini-case studies to offer insights in response to these questions.

Bridging the gap with a gender lens: How two implementation research datasets were repurposed to inform health policy reform in Kenya.

Policies as they are written often mask the power relations behind their creation (Hull, 2008). As a result, not only are policies that appear neat on the page frequently messy in their implementation on the ground, but the messiness of implementation, and implementation science, often brings these hidden power relations to light. In this paper, we examine the process by which different data sources were generated within a programme meant to increase access to quality private healthcare for the poorest populations in Kenya, how these sources were brought and analyzed together to examine gender bias in the large-scale rollout of Kenya's National Hospital Insurance Fund (NHIF) beyond public hospitals and civil service employees, and how these findings ultimately were developed in real time to feed into the NHIF reform process.

The inclusion of sexual and reproductive health services within universal health care through intentional design.

In this paper, we argue that how sexual and reproductive health (SRH) services are included in UHC and health financing matters, and that this has implications for universality and equity. This is a matter of rights, given the differential health risks that women face, including unwanted pregnancy. How traditional vertical SRH services are compensated under UHC also matters and should balance incentives for efficiency with incentives for appropriate provision using the rights-based approach to user-centred care so that risks of sub-optimal outcomes are mitigated.

Get Smart: Learning and partnership with Ethiopia's Health Extension Programme to re-envision contraceptive service delivery to young couples.

Adolescents 360 (A360) implements the Smart Start (SS) programme through Ethiopia's Health Extension Programme (HEP). SS is premised on financial planning as an entry point to discuss family planning (FP) with newly married couples and central to its delivery are the health extension workers (HEW). This article evaluates the A360 experience and learning from the process evaluation implemented by Itad to understand contextual barriers and enablers from the perspective of the HEW.

Challenges and opportunities in evaluating programmes incorporating human-centred design: lessons learnt from the evaluation of Adolescents 360.

Adolescents 360 (A360) is a four-year initiative (2016-2020) to increase 15-19-year-old girls' use of modern contraception in Nigeria, Ethiopia and Tanzania. The innovative A360 approach is led by human-centred design (HCD), combined with social marketing, developmental neuroscience, public health, sociocultural anthropology and youth engagement 'lenses', and aims to create context-specific, youth-driven solutions that respond to the needs of adolescent girls. The A360 external evaluation includes a process evaluation, quasi-experimental outcome evaluation, and a cost-effectiveness study.