Improving Health Budget Execution: Learning from Country Experience

Introduction
This course focuses on processes used by countries to set health priorities that are reflected in national health policies. The course will review, among other topics:

• The importance of improving budget execution for the health sector.
• What is meant by budget execution, what elements a budget execution process is comprised of and the development of a framework to improve budget execution.
• How to engage stakeholders throughout the process, with country examples and references to tools for identifying and engaging stakeholders.
• What steps and approaches can be taken to help build stakeholder buy and consensus.

This course is an interactive, four module, online self-study course; each module allows participants to engage with the materials and reflect on their own country’s context.

Purpose
To provide an overview of budget execution processes at the national level, the budget execution cycle, and stakeholder engagement.

Learning Objectives  
At the end of the course, the student will be able to:

• Describe the importance of institutionalizing explicit budget execution processes for the health sector.
• Recognize key concepts and key sector terms.
• Identify practices that MOHs have used to institutionalize explicit processes for setting national health priorities.
• Describe and map the flow of health funds in their country uses and identify opportunities to simplify funds flow to improve budget execution.  
• Identify bottlenecks in this process and potential solutions that the MOH can implement.

Intended audience
Participants are anticipated to primarily be staff from Ministries of Health who are involved with, support or lead budget execution processes for their countries’ respective health sector.   

Course modality
Self-learning course, free of charge, open to the public and without deadlines to complete it.

Duration
2 hours. The course is open and available in the VCPH. As it is a self-learning course, participants can choose when they are able to progress through the course.

Course Structure
Module 1: Introduction  
Module 2: Budget execution basics
Module 3: Promising practices
Module 4: Bringing it all together