PhD defence M. (Muhammad) Ashar

Since the onset of the Third Millennium, Pakistan did make substantial efforts, yet its progress in the health sector is not encouraging. Except for the public sector review reports and a few small scale studies, limited evidence was available on investments in the health sector and their effectiveness. In this thesis, we attempt to help fill the evidence gap on the effectiveness of health policies. We review healthcare financing and health outcomes, and evaluate two large-scale programs implemented during this Millennium.
We used multiple data sources, including data sets of household surveys, public archives, grey and peer-reviewed scientific literature. We applied state of the art methods on resource tracking and program evaluation, which represent an improvement on the past evidence. We find that while the Pakistan government devoted substantial resources to maternal and child health, but majority of the rural poor did not benefit from these investments. Our findings reject earlier claims of either shortage of resources or substantial achievements of the health policies. Management contracting of primary healthcare and the Norway Pakistan Partnership Initiative on maternal and child care services proved to have had only small effects on the use of these services, either by the general population or by pregnant women and their new-borns. Our findings call for improved governance and transparency in the design and management of future health policies. We conclude that health policies should be devised in the relevant context of socio-economic and cultural factors and should apply a long-term integrated approach.

The PhD defences will not take place publicly in the usual way. A live stream link has been provided to candidate. The ceremony will begin exactly at 15:30.