Summary (English)

Description
Since the mid-1990s, life expectancy in many developing countries has started to decline after almost a century of improvement. There, as in most other parts of the world, significant portions of the population are denied access to needed services or interventions because people cannot afford to pay, or because governments cannot afford to provide them.The way a health system is financed is a key determinant of population health and well-being. In many of the poorest countries, the level of spending is still insufficient to ensure equitable access to basic and essential health services and interventions, and therefore a major policy issue is how to ensure adequate and equitable resource mobilization for health. In some of these countries, a number of donors and international agencies have recently helped to ensure that there will be substantial increases in resources for selected health interventions in the next few years, which raises questions of how to sustain the increased expenditure thereafter.