A Health Practitioner’s Handbook and Toolbox for Identifying the Poor and Vulnerable

A Health Practitioner’s Handbook and Toolbox for Identifying the Poor and Vulnerable

View the handbook and related resources on the JLN website.

Over the past decade, many low- and middle-income countries have made expanding health coverage a national priority. In 2021, 11 countries took part in the Joint Learning Network for Universal Health Coverage (JLN) Learning Collaborative on Population Targeting, which focused on population targeting as a critical component for expanding effective coverage to unserved groups. ‘Population targeting’ aims to effectively identify and reach poor and vulnerable groups, using various mechanisms to target the individuals and households who should be given access to particular benefits. The objective of the Learning Collaborative on Population Targeting (LCPT) was to support JLN member countries to better identify poor and vulnerable population sub-groups so as to target them with specific health programs or benefits. Participants selected two themes around which the work and associated outputs are based:

The Health Practitioners Handbook for Identifying the Poor and Vulnerable aims to help health leaders understand where their systems could improve their population targeting approach. It explains the fundamental concepts of population targeting, provides system diagnostics to understand your own level of progress against a range of dimensions, and links each area where progress may be needed to a specific tool in the Implementation Toolbox.