Analysis yields more health for money in fight against HIV

Genesis was asked by the South African National Department of Health to assist its HIV/AIDS Conditional Grant Unit, which allocates R30 billion of funding annually to provincial health departments, to identify and realise the efficiency savings and optimisation required to achieve and maintain control of the HIV epidemic.

This was a crucial task as South Africa is a global showcase for how it has responded to the HIV epidemic, with over 5.5 million HIV-positive people on lifelong treatment that keeps them healthy and prevents transmission of the virus. 

But this complex national programme with all its benefits comes at a great cost to the country. Given the constrained macroeconomic and fiscal environment as well as declining donor funding, there is a critical need to find ways to get more value for money, or risk losing control of the epidemic.

As a trusted technical partner to the Department’s Conditional Grant Unit, Genesis was able to jointly identify budget planning risks and inefficiencies, and design practical solutions that have and are likely to increasingly realise programme improvements and efficiency savings worth tens of millions of rand.

This project involved using and developing digital solutions such as Power Query and PowerBI to assess variations and anomalies across the provinces in budget planning and spending. This approach enabled root-cause analysis of potential problems identified. Importantly, this process involved strengthening capacity within the National Department of Health to utilise these new and advanced analytical insights.