The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) recognizes the importance of promoting people’s health and well-being to sustainable development. However, ensuring quality health care coverage for people — without having them suffer financial hardship due to out-of-pocket expenses — remains a major challenge in many countries worldwide.

To support positive health outcomes, Target 3.8 of SDG 3 calls on countries to "achieve universal health coverage, including financial risk protection, access to quality essential health care services and access to safe, effective, quality and affordable essential medicines and vaccines for all." As countries strive to realize SDG 3, monitoring progress of Target 3.8 at the national, regional, and global levels will be important to understanding policy and implementation gaps, as well as increasing accountability of the SDG process.

Sub-Saharan Africa has the lowest Universal Health Care service coverage index score of any region (42 out of 100), followed by Southern Asia (53), while East Asia performs highest (77) alongside Northern America and Europe (77). However, according to the noncommunicable diseases sub index score, sub-Saharan Africa performs best of any region in the world in NCD service coverage, which the report attributes largely to lower levels of tobacco use (as opposed to stronger health systems). The low scores for the other sub-indices — reproductive, maternal, newborn, and child health, infectious diseases, and service capacity and access — suggest that weak service capacity and access is seriously undermining sub-Saharan Africa’s health systems and service coverage, compared to other regions.

Read the full article about monitoring sub-Saharan Africa's progress toward universal health care coverage by Amy Copley at Brookings.