Our valued partners, the University of California, San Francisco’s Malaria Elimination Initiative (MEI) and the Centre for Economic Governance and Accountability in Africa (CEGAA) have released a new online training series that strengthens budget management and advocacy skills among country-level malaria leaders in order to improve domestic financing and a sustainable malaria response.

Overview of training

The training series, available on the MEI’s website, is a 3-hour, 14-module video learning series, which provides foundational knowledge on health financing and economics, practical skills to analyse and develop budgets, and tactics to influence decision-makers.

In this training you will learn:

• what is budget monitoring and expenditure tracking for concepts and applications
• how to track public sector budget processes and identify how to engage with or influence future budget planning
• how to develop and analyse performance-based budgets
• how to influence resource allocation using financial evidence and advocacy messaging

The training also offers practical exercises, such as how to perform a budget analysis, and tools, such as a budget analysis template.

About MEI and CEGAA

The MEI and CEGAA’s collaboration began in 2019 when the MEI partnered with Namibia’s National Vector-borne Diseases Control Programme (NVDCP) and six of Namibia’s northern regions to improve malaria budget advocacy. In an effort to create an enabling environment for malaria elimination, the engagement employed the MEI’s Malaria Budget Advocacy Framework (PDF) in effort to fortify leadership and public financial management capacities of regional malaria leaders to mobilize and manage domestic resources for local malaria response.

To address subnational advocacy priorities, the MEI and CEGAA worked with regional health directorates to understand their baseline knowledge, skills, and capacity for BMET. Based on the identified topics for which regional stakeholders wanted support, CEGAA adapted their existing curriculum to the Namibian context and delivered an intensive, week-long skills-building course to 23 regional health leaders, followed by twelve months of virtual group and individual coaching. An adaptation of the training was also provided to 76 multi-sectoral leaders joining newly established subnational Malaria Elimination Task Forces.