Innovations in Health Financing and Social Protection: Centring people and resilient systems

ACADEMIC YEAR 2026-2027 - THIS COURSE IS CURRENTLY UNDER REVISION

This advanced 3-week course will enable you to assess health financing systems and social protection mechanisms and how these can contribute to individual and community resilience, and as a result to achieve health for all.

WHY

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a wake-up call as well as a stress-test for many social health protection systems. Driven by a health security agenda, governments launched or broadened social protection schemes, including for migrants, self-employed workers, homeless people, and the missing middle class. Evidence shows that countries with strong health and social protection systems better able to protect their citizens. However, the pandemic also demonstrated the uneven and unfair distribution of risks and benefits among population groups, the danger of the fragmentation and segmentation in risk-pooling, and the diversion of funds of essential basic health and social services to pandemic prevention, preparedness and response measures.

While the world is struggling to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic, global environmental changes, disasters, conflicts and political turmoil, migration and internal displacement, anti-microbial resistance, etc. keep putting pressure on health, financing and social protection systems. There is a need to build sustainable and inclusive systems for health financing and social protection for health that are capable to absorb, mitigate and respond to shocks, uncertainty and fragility and address the structural inequalities that cause the poor coverage of certain populations. To create such effective systems, substantial countercyclical resources and particular designs tailored to the needs of all groups of the populations are needed. Much attention is currently going to how the resilience of health financing and social protection can be strengthened.

WHAT

This advanced 3-week course will acquaint students with the state-of-art on and insights in how to organize health financing and social protection in challenging times (e.g. enduring informality of the economy and governance, fragile states, shocks), how to improve the resilience of health financing and social protection system, and how robust social protection can promote individual and community resilience and as a result contribute to health for all.