Publications
Summary of publication
Positively, Cambodia’s response to COVID-19 has seen the Government implement social protection programs on an unprecedented scale, including by using an Australian-funded national poverty database to roll out Cambodia’s first nation-wide cash transfer. Another system established with long-term Australian support, the Health Equity Fund (HEF), is enabling 2.6 million of the poorest Cambodians (around 16 percent of the population) to continue to have access to free basic healthcare during the pandemic. Countrywide, the majority (60-80%) of health services are delivered by the private sector, leading to high out of pocket costs for poor families and highlighting the need to increase the quality and accessibility of public services.
These programs build on Australia’s decades of support for health system reforms, including in the past ten years via World Bank multi donor trust funds, such as the Health Equity and Quality Improvement Project (H-EQIP), to which Australia currently contributes. The Ministry of Economy and Finance (MEF) has described H-EQIP as a model of reform it would like to see replicated in other sectors as it demonstrates how to drive sustainable and affordable improvements in service quality while also improving accessibility.