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Letters on Urgent Issues

An Adaptive Governance and Health System Response for the Covid-19 Emergency

Mushtaq Khan, Pallavi Roy, Imran Matin, Mehnaz Rabbani, Rajiv Chowdhury

PII:	S0305-750X(20)30340-5
DOI:	https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2020.105213
Reference:	WD 105213

To appear in:	World Development

Received Date:	14 June 2020
Revised Date:	2 September 2020
Accepted Date:	16 September 2020

Please cite this article as: Khan, M., Roy, P., Matin, I., Rabbani, M., Chowdhury, R., An Adaptive Governance and Health System Response for the Covid-19 Emergency, World Development (2020), doi: https://doi.org/ 10.1016/j.worlddev.2020.105213

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© 2020 Published by Elsevier Ltd.

An Adaptive Governance and Health System Response for the Covid-19 Emergency
Mushtaq Khan1(mk100@soas.ac.uk), Pallavi Roy2(pr16@soas.ac.uk), Imran Matin3(imran.matin@bracu.ac.bd), Mehnaz Rabbani4(mehnaz.rabbani@bracu.ac.bd) and

Rajiv Chowdhury5(rc436@medschl.cam.ac.uk)

Funding:
Khan, Matin, Roy, and Rabbani are part of the SOAS Anti-Corruption Evidence (ACE) research consortium funded by UK aid from the UK Government as per contract [P0 7073]. Chowdhury’s research is funded by UK Research and Innovation. The views presented in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the UK government’s official policies or the views of SOAS-
ACE or other partner organizations. For more information on SOAS-ACE visit www.ace.soas.ac.uk.’

Declarations of interest: None

1 Professor of Economics and Head of Anti-Corruption Evidence Research Partnership Consortium (ACE), SOAS University of London. +447400153253, Email: mk100@soas.ac.uk
2 Lecturer in International Economics and Research Director ACE, SOAS University of London, Email: pr16@soas.ac.uk
3 Executive Director, Brac Institute of Governance and Development, Brac University, Email: imran.matin@bracu.ac.bd
4 Programme Lead, Brac Institute of Governance and Development, Brac University, Email: mehnaz.rabbani@bracu.ac.bd

5 Principal Researcher and Associate Professor Global Health, University of Cambridge, Email: rc436@medschl.cam.ac.uk

In the absence of an efficacious and affordable vaccine, the current crisis of COVID-19 is likely to be a long drawn one for many developing countries. In Bangladesh, where the entire population is susceptible and strict lockdown has been relaxed (as of May 31st 2020) due to concerns over saving livelihoods, the best available resources and capacities in the country have to be mobilized for an integrated and adaptive response strategy. In this paper we argue that a suitable response strategy for a country with highly constrained health system, must consider how response components will be delivered at scale, along with what can be delivered. In order to save maximum number of lives, an optimal strategy will be one that is able to iteratively select the most feasible set of health response and the network of organizations that can deliver most effectively at scale. This might require thinking outside of the conventional vertical network of public health system. Given its history of high-capacity non-government organizations in Bangladesh, it is likely that there are multiple alternative horizontal network options for delivering any set of response interventions. In fact many horizontal networks are already actively engaged in COVID-19 response work. The goal should be to identify and coordinate these networks, create new networks, and embed mechanisms for scaling up what works and scaling down what does not work. For a rapidly escalating and unpredictable crisis such as COVID-19, an adaptive response strategy is needed which allows for old and new networks of organizations to align and work collectively with minimum loss of lives.

An Adaptive Governance and Health System Response for the Covid-19 Emergency

COVID-19 will affect the world for much longer than previously thought. An effective vaccine or treatment may be months away. Moreover, concerns about short-lived immune responses and the possibility of mutations means that we may have to live with the virus for years (Walker PG, Whittaker C, Watson O, et al. 2020, Kissler, Tedijanto, Goldstein, et al. 2020). We suggest an adaptive strategy for cost-effective scaling up in a context of governance constraints, which can be applied to developing countries, drawing on emerging experiences.
[Figure 1]
Several months into the crisis, the basic interventions required to tackle the crisis are known. Figure 1 summarizes the critical components of an integrated response. Saving the greatest number of lives requires simultaneously determining the most feasible and effective set of lockdown strategies and health responses, then identifying the organizations that can deliver and scale up each component of the response most effectively and at the lowest cost (Khan and Roy 2020a). ‘How to deliver’ is as important a question as ‘what to deliver’ and the two have to be jointly determined.
These are not just health system questions, but also governance and capability question as health systems in developing countries are constrained by capacity, governance and corruption issues (Hutchison et al. 2019, Molina et al 2016, Savedoff and Hussmann 2006, Lewis 2006). Effective supply- side responses will require innovative arrangements of bringing together unconventional delivery agencies to deliver appropriate segments of the response. In many countries, such networks have

emerged supporting the existing health systems. The challenge is to devise ways of assessing the effectiveness of different delivery networks in a transparent way and enable better scaling-up.

Developing countries have responded with a variety of delivery responses—sometimes spontaneous—involving not just the public health system but also private sector hospitals, NGOs and companies. These responses need to be quality-controlled and coordinated to be effective, so the role of coordination agencies or their absence has been critical. If multiple agencies have to be comparatively assessed, redundancy has to be built in at the outset, with several networks providing similar response components. This provides a feasible way of identifying the cheapest way of delivering each component at a high-enough quality (Khan and Roy 2020b).
[Figure 2]
Developing countries like Bangladesh or many states within India have not been very successful in enforcing lockdowns or delivering interventions at various levels. Weak centralized systems struggled in communicating the behaviour changes required for social distancing and lockdowns or delivering the required treatments at low cost or at scale. Rapid scaling up of health responses in vertically organized systems with significant capacity, governance and corruption constraints typically resulted in sharp rises in delivery costs or failed to deliver entirely. The cost of interventions is not just its notional market price but also the leakages that happen in procurement and simply through mismanagement (Barkat and Islam 2001). Responses have been more effective and affordable when delivery networks were horizontally coordinated by catalyst organizations, involving agencies in the public, private and NGO sectors (The Hindu 2020). These horizontal networks need to cooperate with, but are different from and operate parallel to, the public health system. If multiple horizontal networks are identified and their performance compared for each response component, it becomes possible to identify the fastest and most cost-effective scaleup strategy. There are examples of how public health interventions were scaled up using various horizontal networks even in fragile contexts like Somalia, Afghanistan and Gaza (Cooley and Papoulidis 2017).
In this approach, we need to ensure that effective coordination agencies are identified, either in government or NGOs that can take charge of maintaining oversight and reporting on outcomes in each network so that there is transparency. Some examples already exist such as the Brihanmumbai (Greater Mumbai) Municipal Corporation (BMC) in Dharavi, the self-help group Kudumbashree in the Indian state of Kerala, and the government of Ghana. Each of these highlight how local enforcement contexts were utilised to deliver effective treatment responses.
BMC’s proactive engagement in Dharavi, one of Asia’s largest slums - where it liaised with local private doctors and community workers for intensive surveillance and screening—has been credited with keeping the case load relatively low. The Kudumbasree ‘model’ of women-led community networks in Kerala monitored elderly and vulnerable citizens in quarantine for everyday and medical needs. In Ghana the government worked with a private drone company to deliver test samples while providing loans to local manufacturers to produce personal protective equipment. In countries which have a rich tradition of social self-governance an adaptive and integrated delivery mechanism would greatly enhance treatment response.

References:
Barkat A, Islam K. 2001. Government-NGO collaboration in Health and Population Sector Programme. Dhaka: University Research Corporation (Bangladesh)

Cooley, L., Papoulidis, J. 2017. Tipping the Scales: Shifting from Projects to Scalable Solutions in Fragile States. Development 60, 190–196. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41301-018-0155-8

Hutchinson, E., Balabanova, D., & McKee, M. 2019. We Need to Talk About Corruption in Health Systems. International journal of health policy and management, 8(4), 191–194. https://doi.org/10.15171/ijhpm.2018.123

Khan, Mushtaq and Roy, Pallavi 2020a. COVID-19: Locking in solutions while in lockdown. SOAS University of London: Anti-Corruption Evidence (ACE) Research Consortium, Briefing Paper 8. London: SOAS University of London
Khan, Mushtaq and Roy, Pallavi 2020b. Rethinking anti-corruption for COVID-
19, https://oxfamblogs.org/fp2p/rethinking-anti-corruption-for-covid-19/ FP2P: Oxfam

Kissler, Stephen M., Tedijanto, Christine, Goldstein, Edward, Grad, H. Yonatan, Lipsitch, Marc. 2020. Projecting the transmission dynamics of SARS-CoV-2 through the postpandemic period. Science.
Volume 368, Issue 6493, 860-868, DOI: 10.1126/science.abb5793
Lewis, M., 2006. Governance and corruption in public health care systems, in Working Paper 782006, Center for Global Development.

Molina, E., et al., 2016. Community monitoring interventions to curb corruption and increase access and quality of service delivery in low-and middle-income countries: a systematic review. Campbell Systematic Reviews, 2016. 12

Savedoff, W.D. and K. Hussmann. 2006. Why are health systems prone to corruption. Global Corruption Report, 4-16.

The Hindu. (2020). How Dharavi Curbed the Spread of Covid-19. Retrieved from https://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/mumbai/how-dharavi-curbed-the-spread-of-covid- 19/article32009506.ece. Accessed August 20 2020
Walker PG, Whittaker C, Watson O, et al. 2020. The global impact of COVID-19 and strategies for mitigation and suppression. London: WHO Collaborating Centre for Infectious Disease Modelling, MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis, Abdul Latif Jameel Institute for Disease and Emergency Analytics, Imperial College London. DOI: https://doi.org/10.25561/77735

Figure 1: Components of health response strategy

Figure 2: An adaptive and integrated response strategy

Identify
potentially feasible networks

Signal relative performance
to direct the attention of donors, lenders and government
Identify most cost effective arrangement

Scale up more
effective networks

Identify catalyst organizations
and coordination mechanisms, identify and encourage redundancies

And scale down less effective
ones

Funding:
Khan, Matin, Roy, and Rabbani are part of the SOAS Anti-Corruption Evidence (ACE) research consortium funded by UK aid from the UK Government as per contract [P0 7073]. The views presented in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the UK government’s official policies or the views of SOAS-ACE or other partner organizations. For more information on SOAS-ACE visit www.ace.soas.ac.uk.’

Declarations of interest: None