A Conversation with MTaPS Principal Health Financing Advisor Andre Zida

What is your role for MTaPS?

I am a principal health financing advisor for MTaPS. My responsibilities include:

• Leading the design and implementation of MTaPS activities related to health financing
• Providing technical expertise and capacity building to improve health financing aspects of pharmaceutical-sector governance and the use of pharmaceutical data for decision making
• Designing peer-to-peer collaborative learning approaches to pharmaceutical health financing concepts

What excites you about this program?

I bring 16 years of health financing experience to pharmaceutical financing, which is a new territory for many people. For example, for decades, countries conducted health expenditure tracking using the System of Health Accounts (SHA2011) framework. Nobody implemented pharmaceutical expenditure tracking using the SHA2011. Through MTaPS, we are planning to conduct this exercise for the first time in collaboration with Abt Associates’ Local Health System Sustainability project.

What impact are you seeing as MTaPS begins its activities?

Drug cost is the biggest household health expense, and MTaPS is supporting processes for UHC and evidence-based policy making, which will reduce the burden.

What’s one change you would like to see in global health that would transform health outcomes?

I would like to see country policy makers empowered to use published pharmaceutical evidence in their efforts to minimize total expenditures on health care and to achieve equitable distribution of the benefits of quality health care.