Insights & Impact

Insights
Impact

Insights

Blended Finance

Blended finance is a model of financing where public and private sector finance come together and form a partnership, seeing the impact and value of working together. These funding streams catalyze greater levels of investment to maximize impact. The blended finance investment transaction offers benefits for all involved and means healthcare programs in LMICs can scale up and function more efficiently, providing better care to more people.

HFI believes blended finance can be a key tool in bolstering LMIC’s COVID-19 responses. The OECD has highlighted blended finance as the most promising solution to end extreme poverty and even alleviate the effects of climate change, thereby closing the trillion-dollar investment gap in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Blended finance has the capacity to simultaneously de-risk private investments and enable health initiatives to continue to scale and replicate after the exit of donor capital.

Blended finance projects today are majorly targeted to solve emerging market challenges. These regions have been outperforming developed markets in the last 10 years.

Concept Definition Concept Toolkit

Blended finance only works with good strategy. Although there are many benefits to using blended finance models for health, many are not using these techniques because they lack an understanding of when and how to use them. To guide you in deciding if blended finance is a valuable tool to create an effective impact, HFI identified six principles of a good transaction.

Watch HFI’s CEO Andrea Feigl explain these principles in the video below, produced in collaboration with our knowledge partner, FORESIGHT Global Health.

Watch the Video Video Transcript

Woman with a tablet, connecting people icons in a network

Multi-Donor Trust Fund

HFI prepared the business plan for the WHO NCD High Level
Commission Multi-Partner Trust Fund, released in Oman, 2019

Despite non-communicable diseases (NCDs) being the leading cause of death and disability globally, the financing and investment gap for NCDs continues to grow. As such, the UN Inter-Agency Task Force (UNIATF) on the Prevention and Control of NCDs alongside the WHO Independent High-Level Commission on NCDs has expressed a bold call for the creation of a catalytic Multi-Donor Trust Fund (MDTF) to mobilize resources for NCDs and mental health.

This paper provides a review of previous global health and development trust funds, and lessons learnt from the design and operations, proposes options for potential financing mechanisms for scaling up action on NCDs, and presents a business and policy case for the creation of a Multi-Donor Trust Fund for NCDs, including considerations around the rationale, scope, operations, and results framework.

Non-Communicable Diseases and COVID-19

With the global health crisis of COVID-19 unfolding around us, the Health Finance Institute is actively monitoring and working with its partners on responses to this pandemic.

The World Health Organization has released an information note on COVID-19 and NCDs, including recommendations on lifestyle and patient management. Individuals with co-morbidities and underlying chronic conditions are at higher risk for infection, severity of, and death by COVID-19, as recent data from the CDC reveal. Additionally, risk groups for NCDs such as smokers have been estimated to be 14 times more likely to develop severe COVID-19 infection as compared to non-smokers. We at HFI are especially concerned about these most vulnerable individuals around the world.

Impact report title page with person writing, person taking blood pressure, and stock market screen

2020

HFI is proud to announce the publication of our first Impact Report. 2020 was an extremely challenging year, but HFI was still able to make significant progress towards our mission of building public-private finance partnerships and translating evidence to achieve global health and wellbeing.

Impact Report

Financial Statement

990

Our Blogs

HFI Rallies with Others to Institute Change in Davos, Geneva, and Beyond

In May, HFI was represented in Geneva and Davos, Switzerland during the 75th World Health Assembly (WHA). As multiple events were held in these locations, HFI was a staple at the World Heart Summit (WHS), World Economic Forum (WEF), Female

Incentivizing Healthy Living

Wellness-linked insurance programs offer members incentives to engage in healthy behaviors. These models show great promise in reducing healthcare costs and improving health outcomes. This is particularly true for NCDs, which require ongoing treatment and monitoring, and can result in complications that are both dangerous to the patient’s health and expensive to treat. Read HFI’s new blog below to learn more about wellness-linked insurance and how innovative finance solutions can expand these models to include lower-income customers.

New Administration – New Commitment to Global Health?

The opinion article, entitled “Blended finance solutions to the NCD gap,” examines the current burden of NCDs globally and the inadequate mechanisms for financing NCD care. Our CEO Dr. Andrea Feigl makes the case for why investment in NCDs should be a priority despite the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic and elaborates on specific blended finance instruments that can kickstart a more effective response to the massive burden posed by these diseases.

Who Gets the Vaccine? To ensure vulnerable populations get priority access to a COVID-19 vaccine, we need better health data

As unfurling the complexities of COVID-19 continues to pose difficulty for global health specialists, emerging data from the pandemic is a constant reminder of the interconnectedness of non-communicable disease (NCDs) with this new virus.

Opinion: Blended finance solutions to the NCD funding gap

Every second NCDs are responsible for one death globally. That is equal to losing the entire population of the state of California – annually.