image: Profile photo of project leader Prof. Kjell Arne Johansson
Credit: Jana Wilbricht
The research project “Fair Choices on the Path to Universal Health Coverage — In Times of Change”, led by Professor Kjell Arne Johansson at the Bergen Centre for Ethics and Priority Setting in Health (BCEPS), University of Bergen, Norway, has been awarded NOK 129 million (as of now ca. 11 million Euro / 13 million USD) in funding over five years (2026-2030) by the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad).
The overall goal of the new project is to strengthen low- and middle-income countries to be able to handle the large cuts in development aid. The country teams in the project will help to improve the legitimacy, effectiveness, efficiency, and fairness of priority setting within their respective countries through evidence-informed, context-specific priority setting. BCEPS researchers will collaborate with academic institutions and governing bodies in Tanzania, Nepal, Zanzibar, Ghana, and Ethiopia, among others, to improve the health priorities.
Project leader Kjell Arne Johansson is the deputy director of the Bergen Centre for Ethics and Priority Setting in Health (BCEPS), a Norwegian Centre of Excellence in the Medical Faculty at the University of Bergen and leads the FairChoices research group. Johansson is a medical doctor and professor in BCEPS, Department of Global Public Health and Primary Care. He has extensive experience in population ethics research and priority setting in health, where he has been engaged in developing innovative methods for fair priority setting in global health and applying them to both low- and high-income country settings.
All countries have to decide which public health services to invest in for their populations. Ensuring equitable access to quality health services without financial risk for patients is a core responsibility of the state. In countries with highly constrained budgets, decisions on how to ensure access, equity, financial risk protection and entitlements are even more critical, both for personal welfare and national development.
This work is especially important now, as many LMICs face a radically shifting demography and dramatic reductions in donor funding in the global and public health space, making priority setting in health even more critical. The project will support countries in navigating these transitions to build resilient, equitable health systems.
Specifically, the project will encourage and support health policy decisions that are both evidence-based and equitable, meaning they are grounded in principles of fairness. As part of this effort, it advances economic evaluation, applied ethics, locally constructed value frameworks and inclusive deliberation in the health priority setting process. This will not only lead to a more efficient use of budgets by directing resources towards highly cost-effective health interventions, but the project will also strengthen capacity in these areas among both academics and policymakers in the project countries to ensure sustainability.
The project builds upon and complements prior and other current work of BCEPS, whose mission it is to support fair, ethical, cost-effective, and evidence-based priority setting in health, while strengthening the capacity of domestic institutions in LMICS to undertake rigorous research, policy analysis, and inclusive deliberative processes, thereby enabling evidence-informed, fair and transparent decision-making in pursuit of universal health coverage (UHC) and a sustainable transition from external financial assistance.
The “Fair Choices on the Path to Universal Health Coverage” project will apply the research findings and expertise generated by BCEPS to support explicit, legitimate and evidence-informed health priorities and policy reform in LMICs.