Making the Case for Health: A Messaging Guide for Domestic Resource Mobilization

Making the Case for Health is a compilation of messages and related practical country examples that build off of the concept of HPHF, integrate human capital concepts, and can be used to facilitate communication across health and finance sectors to make the case for investment in health as a way to achieve health sector objectives, including Universal Health Coverage goals. This work is not intended to be an advocacy tool to be used to make general or over-stated arguments around more money for health. Rather, it expands the finance lexicon of health actors, articulating how to frame rationales for investing in health by couching arguments and related health and health financing functions in terms of fiscal space for health and underlying economic principles that more effectively resonate with finance sector actors.

The primary audience for this Guide are Ministry of Health officials who are engaged in dialogue with finance decision-makers, including parliamentarians and other high-level finance actors, and are seeking to more appropriately frame their evidence and rationale for investing in health for these counterparts. The Guide has benefitted from the joint participation of health and finance policy makers from Joint Learning Network (JLN) countries in distilling and refining these messages in a way that they help bridge the communication gap.

Framed as a messaging and communication tool, this Guide tries to retain simplicity and brevity. It does not provide detailed analytical advice on how to most convincingly use data to make the case for investing in health, nor aim to provide a primer on principles of strategic communications. Other knowledge products are already available from the JLN to meet these additional needs. As a quick-reckoner of select essential concepts, this Guide provides links to existing resources and information that allow the reader to go deeper where there is a need, and to compile country-specific evidence to support the messages.