Health Sector Development Program IV (2010/11 – 2014/15).

This Health Sector Development Program (HSDP) IV is a five-year nationwide sectoral document - situated within the government’s overall national vision to become a middle-income country - aiming at guiding the development of sub-national plans and setting the rules of engagement in the health sector in order to achieve the Vision of "seeing healthy, productive, and prosperous Ethiopians". The consequent Mission for the sector will be to reduce morbidity, mortality and disability and improve the health status of the Ethiopian people through providing and regulating a comprehensive package of promotive, preventive, curative and rehabilitative health services via a decentralized and democratized health system. To do so, the health sector of Ethiopia will have to stretch to attain its objectives of reaching every section of the population with effective health interventions. The document focuses on the following three key areas of intervention in the health sector (1) Excellence in health service delivery; (2) Excellence in leadership and governance; and (3) Excellence in health infrastructure and resources. To achieve the overall goal of the Strategy, ten strategic objectives are identified, as follows (i) improve access to health services; (ii) improve community ownership; (iii) maximize resource mobilization and utilization; (iv) improve quality of health services; (v) improve public health emergency preparedness and response; (vi) improve pharmaceutical supply and services; (vii) improve regulatory system; (viii) improve evidence-based decision making by harmonization and alignment; (ix) improve health infrastructure; and (x) improve human capital and leadership.
To help eliminate hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition, the document aims at (i) increasing proportion of severely malnourished under-5 children that are adequately managed from 23% to 91%; (ii) developing the inpatient and outpatient therapeutic programs to improve malnutrition cure rate and mortality rate up to acceptable level; (iii) increasing the proportion of newborns breastfed within one hour of birth (initial breastfeeding); and (iv) increasing the percentage of 6-9 month old infants on complementary food and continued breastfeeding.
Rural poverty reduction focuses on covering all the rural areas remained uncovered by previous HSDPs from the Health Extension Programme (HEP) coverage, aiming to achieve universal Primary health care (PHC) coverage through vigorous and incremental implementation of the program nationwide.
In order to increase the resilience of livelihoods to disasters, the HSDP IV envisages the following interventions (i) the Ministry of Health, in collaboration with the Environmental Protection Authority, will raise community awareness, initiate training to health professionals and researchers on the health effects of climate change, ensure that systems are in place to detect and track climate change induced health problems, make the necessary preparations to manage climate change associated risks; (ii) development of a monitoring system to track up to date information; and (iii) an improved health risk identification, early warning, response and recovery from the disasters, aiming at an early verification, rapid response and containment of public health emergencies.
As for the Governance, its system has been revised in order to strengthen and rationalize the structures and the HSDP-IV plan is that inter-sectoral collaboration will take place at different levels of the health system through formal government institutions (such as regional and district councils) and health sector governance structures. Furthermore, the successful implementation of the Program provides for the equitable and effective resource allocation and leadership development within the sector and the community.