Urban Health Initiative: An Insight toward Health Reform

The Urban Health Initiative (UHI) is part of a 5-year and four-country initiative supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The countries are Nigeria, Kenya, Senegal, and India. UHI India is a consortium of international, national, nongovernmental, and community-based organizations working together to improve the health of the urban poor, especially in the state of Uttar Pradesh. The achievement Reports are also available for the period of 2009 through 2013. UHI is designed to be complementary to national and state health sector plans and goals. As per the official document, the initiative supports the implementation and scale-up of effective evidence-based strategies, as well as the testing of promising innovations. The NGO Report states to have covered randomly a population of 860,500 and MWRA data belongs to the slums of Agra, Allahabad, Aligarh, Gorakhpur, Bareli, Farukhabad, Kanpur, Lucknow, Mathura, Moradabad and Varanasi. The “working together to”, “designed to” and the “Initiative supports” as stated above were too lucrative and well-said statements for healthcare as well as health services provision reforms. But unfortunately, the statements although aimed at total health sector reforms, at least by the meaning of the above official statements, the facts and highlights of the initiative were completely twisted toward family planning only. Maybe enough official data are available on family planning for reutilization in the reporting system.