The NCDI Poverty Network translates its goal of preventing and reducing the death and suffering of those doubly afflicted by extreme poverty and noncommunicable conditions into practice through four strategic initiatives:

Expanding the Network

The NCDI Poverty Network disseminates and builds on the findings of both the Lancet NCDI Poverty Commission and National NCDI Poverty Commissions to inform the policy and financing landscape for an expanded agenda around NCDIs affecting the world’s poorest.

To date, 22 countries have established National NCDI Poverty Commissions as part of Phase 1.

Integration Science

The NCDI Poverty Network facilitates collaborative research to understand key gaps and develop innovative solutions to improve integrated care delivery for NCDIs.

The Network is committed to build capacities for researchers to understand and address specific challenges facing health service delivery for NCDIs in LLMIC settings and support the translation of prioritized NCDI interventions into actionable delivery strategies through a process of integration science.

National NCDI Poverty Commissions are particularly concerned with the most vulnerable groups (the poor, those with more severe health conditions, children and young adults) and places priority on interventions that must be implemented at intermediate and tertiary health system levels alongside those that can be delivered in the community and at primary health care facilities. These prioritized interventions canot be implemented in isolation and the Lancet NCDI Poverty Commission previously identified prototypical integrated care teams with the skills needed to deliver groups of related services. 

Phase 2 of the National Commission process supports countries to break down otherwise unclear pathways to UHC into manageable components. Over the next three years, eight additional countries in the NCDI Poverty Network will undertake health facility assessments and develop local approaches to leverage inefficiencies in existing space and staffing; decentralize prioritized interventions progressively; and optimize clustering of services around shared competencies. 

PEN-Plus Partnership

The NCDI Poverty Network supports development, piloting, and scale up of innovative service delivery models to decentralize interventions for the prevention and management of NCDIs.

The NCDI Poverty Network supports countries in initial implementation of NCDI treatment delivery strategies through the PEN-Plus Partnership. During the implementation phase, national commissions train health providers to delivery groups of prioritized services through integrated delivery models; provide these services to groups of patients at facilities in multiple regions of the country; prepare these facilities to serve as training sites for other providers; and develop the policies and plans needed to scale these delivery models nationally.

The ultimate goal of the PEN-Plus partnership is to increase the number of the world’s poorest children and young adults receiving high-quality care for severe chronic NCDs by a factor of 10 by 2030, enabling an additional 1 million people living with these conditions to receive treatment. 

PEN-Plus is a proven integrated delivery model that has already decentralized priority interventions for severe, chronic NCDs such as type 1 diabetes, rheumatic heart disease, and sickle cell disease in Haiti, Liberia, Malawi, and Rwanda. 

Learn more about PEN-Plus here.

National Scale-up and NCDI Poverty Fund

The NCDI Poverty Fund aims to catalyze large-scale financing through public-private partnerships to support national operational plans for PEN-Plus.

The Lancet NCDI Poverty Commission showed that interventions to treat NCDIs account for the largest gap in UHC financing for low-income countries. These countries will not have the domestic resources to finance these interventions by 2030 and external financing for NCDIs is virtually non-existent. External resources need to be mobilized by activating the voices of those directly affected by severe NCDIs in high-income and low-income countries. 

The network’s Voices of NCDI Poverty Fellowship supports a generation of activists who are forging new alliances across groups of diseases that benefit from shared integrated delivery models, beginning with PEN-Plus. One of the goals of this effort is to scale external funding for PEN-Plus implementation to at least US$100 million annually by 2030, enabling an additional 1 million of the poorest children and young adults to receive high-quality treatment for severe NCDs.