Quality leadership: A prerequisite for development

The Ministry of Health and Population (MoHP) is determined to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) by the stipulated deadline of 2015; and the Ministerial Leadership Initiative (MLI) for Global Health has joined hands with the Ministry to provide support in this endeavour.

MLI, a program funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, seeks to strengthen the capacity of ministries of health in five countries: Nepal, Ethiopia, Mali, Senegal and Sierra Leone. The program works with the ministries of health in the respective countries to strengthen leadership in three policy areas: health financing for equity, donor harmonization in health, and reproductive health.

Tooled with a ground-breaking demand-driven model, MLI focuses on the critical importance of political leadership, ministerial knowledge and decision-making skills to address major health challenges faced by specific countries.

Mary Robinson, President of Realizing Rights, one of the founding members behind the idea of the MLI, stressed the importance of political leadership in achieving positive health outcomes.

“We have the resources and technology needed to reach the MDGs for health. What we need now is the political will to employ them. If we are serious about meeting the MDGs, we need to be serious about supporting political will and action. The MLI is pioneering a demand-driven and practice-based leadership development model to do just that,” says Robinson.

In May 2008, Nepal was competitively selected as one of five countries to participate in the MLI, and by September 2008 the MoHP and the MLI had collaboratively devised a technical assistance plan to be implemented during the first year of the three-year initiative.

The MLI countries were selected as a result of their unique approach to tackling a specific public health issue. Health ministries in each country have set for themselves policy challenges for which efficient and effective leadership and management skills would play a crucial role. Nepal was singled out owing to its stated ambitions and committed actions to systematically abolish user-charges for basic essential health services.

“Nepal is the only country in South Asia to receive MLI support and, as MLI is a long-term commitment, I am confident that it will benefit greatly from it,” says Gabriele Mallapaty, the Country Lead of MLI in Nepal.
She further says that Nepal has enshrined health as a fundamental human right in its interim constitution, with basic free care as a right of all Nepalese, and reproductive rights for all Nepali women. By focusing MLI support on furthering pro-poor health policies, the Ministry has reinforced its commitment to not only uphold these constitutional rights, but also to equip its leaders to put them into action.

One year on, Nepal is leading in putting its first-year technical assistance plan into practice. It is in the preliminary stages of synchronizing a knowledge management system accessible to all ministry staff, and planning is underway for a leadership training to improve negotiation and decision-making skills of senior staff at the ministry in late September of this year. H.E Minister Pokharel and members of his leadership team also attended the Global Ministerial Forum on Health Research in Bamako, Mali last November as part of a peer learning process.

On May 20, a delegation from Nepal will attend the 62nd World Health Assembly in Geneva. During the World Health Assembly, the leadership teams of all five MLI countries will get the opportunity to exchange views and share their experiences of working with MLI and other health partnerships such as the International Health Partnership thus far.

Although still in its formative stages, a lot is to be expected from the dynamic MLI-MoHP partnership within the field of leadership development, ultimately to result in providing basic health services for all Nepalese.