The Global Financing Facility (GFF) in support of “Every Woman, Every Child” was announced in September 2014. Its aim is to accelerate efforts to end preventable maternal, newborn, child and adolescent deaths and improve the health and quality of life of women, adolescents and children, thereby preventing up to 3.8 million maternal deaths, 101 million child deaths, and 21 million stillbirths in high-burden countries, by 2030.
The GFF acts as a pathfinder in a new era of financing for development by pioneering a model that shifts away from focusing solely on official development assistance to an approach that combines external support, domestic financing, and innovative sources for resource mobilization and delivery (including the private sector) in a synergistic way.
The GFF will serve as a major vehicle for financing the proposed Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) on healthy lives and will play a special role in scaling up financing to support the UN Secretary-General’s renewed “Global Strategy for Women’s and Children’s Health”.
On May 17, 2015, the GFF team released a Business Plan to operationalize the GFF and articulate how it will bring to bear smart, scaled and sustainable financing designed to achieve and measure results, as follows:
- Smart financing that prioritizes investment in evidence-based, high-impact solutions – such as nutrition, immunization and family planning, delivered in an efficient, results-focused manner;
- Scaled financing that mobilizes the additional resources needed to fully finance the maternal and child health agenda from both domestic and international, and both public and private sources; and,
- Sustainable longer-term financing strategies that anticipate the economic transition of countries from low- to middle-income status and secure universal access to essential services for every mother and every child.
The business plan is the result of seven months of work by a 54-member Business Planning Team and the GFF Oversight Group, which provided feedback and strategic guidance throughout the process. The spirit of collaboration and strong partnership—among the GFF front-runner country governments (Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Kenya and Tanzania) and founding donors, civil society, development partners, UN agencies, foundations, and the private sector—is evident in the final document.
As partners rally around priorities in the four front-runner countries, work to go to scale in a much larger group of countries, from among the 32 countries accounting for 88% of all child and maternal deaths globally, is under way.
The GFF will be officially launched in July 2015, at the Financing for Development Conference, in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.