Viewpoint: Why and how tuberculosis control should be included in health sector reviews

Sector-wide approaches (SWAps) are currently implemented in several, predominantly highly donor-dependent low-income countries, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa. SWAp intends to enhance health sector performance, especially efficiency, effectiveness, coherence and sustainability. SWAps have been criticized for not being able to produce tangible results and the credibility of a SWAp would increase substantially if such results in terms of health services outputs could be demonstrated. We argue that the monitoring of tuberculosis within the SWAp reviews held to assess sector performance deserves a higher profile. Tuberculosis constitutes in the first place and one of the major public health problems in most of the countries, where SWAps have been introduced, but provided that the programme is integral part of the sector policy and financial management, the indicators used for monitoring TB control programmes can also be used as excellent proxies for monitoring overall health sector performance.