About

To improve health equity in Myanmar, Access to Health focuses on the most underserved and vulnerable populations under a rights-based approach, bringing services where they are most needed.

Governance

Access to Health is a multi-donor fund set up in January 2019 to support health in Myanmar. The Access to Health Fund is the follow-on mechanism from the Three Millennium Development Goal (3MDG) Fund, which operated for six and a half years and delivered around USD 308 million from 2012 to 2018. The estimated Access to Health budget is USD 252 million over the period 2019-2023. 

The Fund is managed by the United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS), which also manages the Livelihoods and Food Security Trust Fund, the Joint Peace Fund, the Nexus Response Mechanism and is Principal Recipient for The Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis, and Malaria. By managing all five funding streams, UNOPS increases aid effectiveness, efficiency and quality, and value for money. Risks are lowered through increased knowledge, standardized procedures, and greater transparency. The five streams are sharing facilities, procedures, and standards. At the same time, comprehensive monitoring and financial controls ensure transparency in charging for shared services.

Corporate Partnership

In 2021, Access to Health launched a five-year project funded with USD 10 million by the Global CSR Program of Takeda Pharmaceutical Company Limited—a global, values-based, research and development-driven biopharmaceutical leader headquartered in Japan. With a focus on sustainability, the project aims to strengthen healthcare for underserved communities in Myanmar’s Shan State by improving health infrastructure, providing training and support for health staff, increasing uptake of health services through demand generation activities with local communities, implementing strategic purchasing initiatives and reinforcing the supply chain management of local health providers.

Priorities and principles

Access to Health has two core priorities:

  • A focus on equity, with the Fund adopting a rights-based approach promoting inclusiveness, and explicitly targeting underserved and vulnerable populations.
  • A focus on strengthening the local and community health systems, to respond to health needs and ensure long-term health benefits for target populations.

In focusing on vulnerable populations, the Fund puts gender and diversity at the centre of its approach, ensuring service provision understands and alleviates barriers to women, girls and vulnerable people’s access to healthcare. The Fund is also guided by a human rights-based approach to health as well as the principles of non-discrimination, participation and accountability.

Additionally, the work of Access to Health is shaped by a number of key principles. These include:

  • Human Rights-Based Approach: The Access to Health Fund promotes accountability, equity, inclusion, non-discrimination, participation; and is committed to the AAAQ Framework (Availability, Accessibility, Acceptability, and Quality). The Fund upholds people’s free, active and meaningful participation in health-related decisions, their right to access information, their ability to hold health providers to account through demand generation activities, project information sharing, community engagement activities, and community feedback mechanisms; and that health service providers listen to the voices of people and are accountable in their delivery of quality services.
  • Promoting Gender Equality: The Access to Health Fund is committed to accelerating efforts to promote gender equality and ensure equal access to health services for people of all genders, by better understanding context and needs, overcoming barriers to healthcare access, and increasing women’s voice and representation.
  • Sustainability: The Access to Health Fund builds long-term capacity in Myanmar’s health response.
  • Conflict Sensitivity and Social Cohesion: The Access to Health Fund upholds at all times the principle of “do no harm” and seeks avenues – through its work – to promote social cohesion without challenging or threatening ethnic, cultural or religious identity.
  • Flexibility: The Access to Health Fund is open to change and adapts its approach to best deliver on the mission.

Geographies

Access to Health concentrates its interventions in Rakhine, Kachin, Shan, Kayin and Chin states. The Fund also supports health care activities in the Yangon Region with a specific focus on sexual and reproductive health and rights, and Tuberculosis.

Areas of work

Communities and regions in Myanmar have vastly different needs, and our key health interventions are designed to specifically meet the needs of the communities we work in. The Access to Health Fund supports integrated programmes in the areas of maternal newborn and child health, nutrition, sexual and reproductive health and rights, drug use and health consequences, tuberculosis, malaria, disability-inclusive health, local health system strengthening and the emergency response to natural disasters and other crises.

Maternal, newborn and child health (MNCH)

This programme aims to improve access to MNCH services for poor and vulnerable populations with the goal of reducing child and maternal mortality in the country. Supported interventions include the provision of antenatal and postnatal care, emergency maternal and child referrals, nutrition interventions, support for community health workers and volunteers, and improved coordination. The programme integrates interventions from other thematic areas, including nutrition, sexual and reproductive health and rights, tuberculosis and malaria. The Fund supports integrated MNCH grants to implementing partners in townships in Chin, Kachin, Kayin, Rakhine, and Shan States.

Drug use and its health consequences

This programme aims to reduce HIV, hepatitis, sexually transmitted diseases and other negative health consequences among people who use or inject drugs, their sexual partners and families. Harm reduction activities are delivered in a comprehensive package together with other integrated services for tuberculosis and sexual and reproductive health and rights services. Community-level harm reduction programmes include prevention through health education, needle/syringe and condom programmes, HIV testing, hepatitis and sexually transmitted infection screening, referral for antiretroviral therapy and overdose prevention and management programmes. Harm reduction interventions are supported in Kachin State, which is one of the few locations in Southeast Asia with a generalized HIV epidemic.

This programme aims to reduce TB incidence and mortality rates, narrow the disease notification gap, and contribute to the global effort to end the TB epidemic. Interventions are targeted to serve high-risk populations, which include people living in congested urban areas, particularly in Yangon and remote areas where higher TB prevalence has been found due to poor access to regular services. Our partners implement active case-finding activities through mobile and fixed facility-based services, deliver community-based TB care through volunteer networks, and support referrals for treatment. Tuberculosis services are integrated with funded programmes for maternal, newborn and child health, and harm reduction, offering holistic care at a single access point.

To ensure the sustainability of investments in essential health services, the Access to Health Fund works to support more responsive, resilient and people-centred local and community health systems, increase financial protection and improve service provision and service quality for poor, underserved, marginalized and vulnerable people. The Fund also focuses on community systems strengthening, supporting demand generation and health service accountability, community engagement, community feedback mechanisms, and capacity development of community-based health workers.

Emergency response

Access to Health supports the emergency health and humanitarian response to populations affected by crises and natural disasters. Partners deliver emergency health services through mobile clinics, an expanded referral network, engagement with new service providers and increased direct support of local partners to ensure vulnerable populations have continued access to essential health services in emergency situations. This includes health services in the areas of maternal, newborn and child health; sexual and reproductive health and rights and gender-based violence. The Fund has also supported nationwide prevention, testing and treatment efforts in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

This programme aims to extend access to sexual and reproductive health services and information and ensure the realization of rights and autonomy related to sexual and reproductive health for vulnerable populations in Access to Health Fund-supported areas. The component has a particular focus on adolescents and youth. Key activities include family planning and contraception services, cervical cancer screening and prevention, post-abortion care, awareness raising on gender and gender-based violence (GBV), referral and psychosocial support for GBV survivors, and adolescent sexual and reproductive health and rights. Interventions are part of the Fund’s programmes for maternal, newborn and child health, and drug use and health consequences, and are also implemented directly. They operate in Chin, Kachin, Kayin, Mon, Rakhine and Shan states and Yangon Region.

This component is integrated into the maternal, newborn and child health programme and aims to improve nutrition among children, especially in the first 1,000 days of life, and pregnant and lactating women. Nutrition support covers routine growth monitoring, screening and treatment for malnourished children, establishing referral mechanisms for children with severe acute malnutrition and providing referral support, and nutrition education and counselling at the community level.

Malaria

This programme aims to reduce the incidence of the disease and related mortality rates and complement malaria elimination activities in Myanmar. Malaria activities are integrated into the maternal, newborn and child health programme via integrated community malaria volunteers (ICMV). Supported interventions aim to improve case detection, treatment and prevention of malaria in Myanmar through rapid diagnostic testing, effective treatment with Artemisinin-based combination therapy and community education on vector-borne diseases. The Fund’s support focuses particularly on migrants and hard-to-reach populations living in malaria high burden townships in Chin, Kachin, Kayin and Shan States.

Disability inclusive health

The Access to Health Fund has integrated disability inclusion across its portfolio of supported health services since the start of the Fund in 2019. This includes mainstreaming disability inclusion in health care and ensuring that persons with disabilities can access quality health services. Supported activities comprise awareness raising in communities and with key stakeholders, capacity building for implementing partners, ensuring that emergency referral support and essential health services are available and accessible to persons with disabilities, providing health education in disability-inclusive formats, and empowering people with disabilities to utilize community-feedback mechanisms.