The partnership between the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) spans three decades and has been instrumental in advancing a multitude of public health goals in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) and improving access to quality health services for the most vulnerable populations. The collaboration between the two institutions has improved the health and lives of the people of the Americas, while also highlighting the need for innovative strategies to continue building on what has been achieved.
USAID has also been a crucial partner in supporting countries’ response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Through their country missions, and as part of the overall contribution of the United States government, USAID provided significant financial resources to scale up countries’ capacity to prevent, detect, monitor, and control outbreaks of COVID-19, optimize country health system capacity to care for COVID-19 patients and rapidly establish international and national coordination and operational support. Later tranches of emergency response funds helped to prepare for the introduction of COVID-19 vaccines.
The current USAID-PAHO Umbrella Agreement (2022-2027) supports a wide portfolio of work to improve public health outcomes in the areas tuberculosis, malaria, neglected infectious diseases and climate change and health.
USAID also supports efforts to protect health across the life course (maternal, neonatal, child, adolescent and family planning and reproductive health), strengthen sustainable health systems and reduce health system barriers and inequalities. This includes approaches that improve the quality and availability of information systems for health, analyze, and address the impact of social determinants of health, and leverage regional partnerships towards efficient, technically sound, inter-programmatic, and cross-sectoral interventions that will positively impact regional health outcomes.
Over the tenure of the PAHO/USAID collaboration, USAID’s financial investments in the Americas have filled in an important resource gap that has enabled PAHO to carry out technical cooperation and information exchange with priority Member States. Perhaps more significantly, this support has served as a catalyst for additional investments and co-financing of public health programs by national governments, moving USAID priority countries towards greater self-reliance.
