Developing national health sector monitoring and accountability platforms. The opportunity of IHP+ in Benin, Burkina Faso, Mali and Senegal

There is now growing consensus about the importance of building and strengthening national monitoring platforms in order to facilitate the evaluation of large-scale health programmes and initiatives in low- and middle-income countries [see the paper published in 2010 in The Lancet by Victora et al.]. This is also crucial for improving accountability, which is defined by the United Nations' Commission on Information and Accountability for Women's and Children's Health as a cyclical process of monitoring, review, and (remedial) action.
The International Health Partnership and related initiatives (IHP+), World Health Organization and other partners have recently developed guidelines to support country-led platforms for monitoring, evaluation and review of national health strategies. The national Compacts promoted in the framework of IHP+ offer an excellent opportunity to foster the development of such country-led platforms for information and accountability. Indeed, a Compact formalises the commitments of the recipient government and health sector partners to increase financing efforts in the health sector, to respect aid effectiveness principles and to support the national health policy and strategies in a common planning, coordination, and monitoring & evaluation framework. IHP+ is also closely connected to initiatives such as the Health Metrics Network that aims to improve the quality of health information in developing countries.
We propose to analyse how the Ministries of Health in four Francophone Western African countries (Benin, Burkina Faso, Mali and Senegal) have seized the opportunity of IHP+ to strengthen their monitoring and accountability platforms, and assess what further actions could be taken in the future. We present a comparative analysis grid filled on the basis of the experience of the co-authors in supporting the process in the four countries. This composes the first step of an on-going research and experience sharing project supported by GRAP-PA Santé.