The journey towards Universal Health Coverage requires inclusive social health protection based on health systems that are affordable and able to adapt to socio-demographic and technological changes responding to the evolving needs of the population. Understanding of the contextual factors along with a conducive health system governance and political commitment are deemed to be among the determinants of better health and key to improve social health protection performance. Good governance is explicitly mentioned in the SDG 16 that points to the need to “build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions. In broad terms, governance can be defined as how societies make and implement collective decisions. Yet, in relation to health systems, governance has been conceptualized in different ways, and there is no standard conceptualisation and methodology to assess its influence on social health protection.

The research program “Health systems governance for an inclusive and sustainable social health protection in Ghana and Tanzania” aims to investigate how to improve social health protection in these countries. To this end it focuses on understanding the main social health protection challenges and it investigates how social health protection can be strengthened.  The program activities are framed taking into account the multi-level nature of governance and several governance domains.