Managing Health Programme Funds
The professional management of funds is particularly important to public health sector programmes, for they generally involve large budgets to be managed and disbursed over several years. Accurate audit trails are vital to the confidence of both clients and donors.
This makes the project-specific managed accounts offered by Crown Agents Bank particularly beneficial to the health sector.
The UK Department for International Development has used the Bank's managed accounts service for over 20 years, and now Global Fund grant recipients are increasingly doing so too, recognising the benefits they receive from a completely integrated supply and finance chain. In many cases the Global Fund transfers money directly to a grant recipient's imprest account with Crown Agents Bank, thereby avoiding delays and ensuring a more streamlined and cost-efficient supply chain.
Payroll Payments
In addition to paying suppliers for goods and services, we also manage the payment of wages and allowances to locally-employed workers. In Zimbabwe we pay salary supplements to over 20,000 essential hospital staff under health worker retention programmes funded by several UN agencies and international donors. Because the recipients can count upon receiving those payments on time, every time, they no longer have to look for informal sources of income to supplement their hospital salaries, resulting in a dramatic improvement in attendance rates.