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News/Event Item
The NGO Code of Conduct: Improving NGO Impact on Health Systems
Sept. 4
Sept. 22, 2008
Global Health Council
Washington, D.C. 20036
Partners Forum
The urgent need to strengthen health systems in developing countries, including building health workforce capacity, has been highlighted in a number of recent dialogues and discussions on global health. In these discussions, a number of ideas were presented for improving best donor and national government approaches to health system strengthening. What has been less discussed is how international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) can play an effective and significant role in contributing to strengthening health systems, particularly around health workforce capacity building. Studies have shown that sometimes NGOS themselves can exacerbate a health workforce shortage crisis in a country rather than improve it by inadvertently diverting health workers, managers and leaders away from public services and creating parallel structures.
In May 2008, a group of nongovernmental organizations released an "NGO Code of Conduct for Health Systems Strengthening" pledge. The purpose of this code is to offer guidance on how international NGOs can play an effective role in health systems strengthening in a way that respects and supports the primacy of the government's responsibility for organizing health system delivery. It specifically identifies six areas where NGOs can improve securing, training and deploying human resources in the countries where they work.
We discussed more about the code, how it can be used by NGOs and the expected impact from three of the code's authors.
Speakers Included:- Eric Friedman, Senior Global Health Policy Advisor, Physicians for Human Rights
- Wendy Johnson, Director of New Initiatives, Health Alliance International
- Rick Rowden, Governance Policy Analyst, ActionAid
Moderator: Smita Baruah, Senior Policy Associate, Government Relations, Global Health Council
View speaker presentations (accessible by members only)
category: Global Health Council News : Advocacy Events
contributed by Liza Nanni on 4 September 2008
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