Biography

Sarah Fox is a Health Economist with practical experience in health sector planning, health financing reforms, survey design and implementation and expenditure tracking. Sarah has worked as a Consultant for OPM as part of the Social Policy Programme since January 2009. Since joining OPM, she has worked on a study linking funding flows and implementation mechanisms to performance and quality of health care in the Democratic Republic of Congo and has developed a monitoring and evaluation framework for a joint UN programme to support decentralised service delivery in India. She has developed the survey tools for a large study to evaluate the impact of the elimination of user fees in Democratic Republic of Congo and she has conducted quantitative and qualitative analysis for the Lady Health Worker Programme evaluation in Pakistan. She has also worked on the development of an on-line learning tool designed to guide users on how to integrate issues relating to violence against women into national planning and budgeting frameworks. Prior to joining OPM, she was an ODI Fellow working as Economic Advisor in the Directorate of Planning and Information in the Ministry of Health and Sanitation in Sierra Leone. During this two-year posting, Sarah contributed to the process of establishing health financing reforms to reduce the financial barriers to health, particularly for the poor. As part of this work, she conducted a review of the costs recovery system and conducted a feasibility study on Social Health Insurance. She helped to strengthen the Health Management Information System through the development of integrated tools and establishing systems for routine data collection and reporting. She supervised, coordinated and conducted the analysis of a range of surveys, including the county's first National Health Accounts and several household- and facility-based surveys for the health sector. She also provided ongoing support to the annual health sector planning, budgeting and review process, where she focused on strengthening the collaboration with donors and UN agencies. Sarah has an MA in Development Economics from the University of Sussex.