Strategic purchasing (SP) for health is an important policy lever to influence health service provision and accelerate progress toward universal health coverage (UHC). The effectiveness of SP in reaching UHC goals is limited if there is poor coordination and fragmentation between schemes. We...

Kenya has progressed towards implementing and institutionalizing strategic health purchasing (SHP) practices as a key strategy to achieving universal health coverage (UHC). However, multiple challenges are faced such as fragmentation of pooling arrangements, inadequate health funding, rigid...

This study explored strategic purchasing of health services in Sierra Leone. Purchasing of healthservices in Sierra Leone is at a formative stage. Our study identified nine such purchasing schemes, which can be grouped into five major categories of purchasers: a) the ministry of health and...

Although strategic purchasing is increasingly advocated as one of the solutions for improving the performance of the health system, purchasing in Senegal has been mostly passive. Some active purchasing mechanisms have been recently introduced as part of the country’s health financing strategy...

Strategic purchasing of health services has been identified as one of the critical components for countries to progress towards achieving universal health coverage (UHC). Due to decentralized governance, there are multiple purchasers in Nigeria, which has led to fragmentation, lack of...

This study aimed to identify lessons on strategic purchasing (SP) reforms in the health sector in Cameroon, with a specific focus on performance-based financing and the voucher system. Specifically, we aimed to identify: (i) current progress, challenges, and opportunities related to the...

Although the Thucydides trap is often used to predict a dark future of the US-China relations, the Samuelson trap is a more useful concept to understand the international economic foundation underlying this potential tragic outcome of international politics. In order to avoid the Thucydides...

The United States, other governments and multinational organizations, and the private sector are urgently exploring the possibility of employing digital currencies, especially for facilitating retail consumer payments domestically and across national borders. Stablecoins represent one of the two...

Firms in developing countries often identify electricity as a major constraint to operations. Decentralized renewable energy sources could help alleviate these constraints. We investigate whether electrification in Nepal -- via microhydro plants and their mini-grids -- helped grow the...

Contemporary world politics is structured around the world order of nation-states in turn founded largely upon a Newtonian cosmology and an associated worldview. I develop a conceptual framework around the ‘epistemic engine’ which organizes and circulates the cosmological and institutional...