Country Ownership: The case of Peru

Health care in the community of Las Moras in Huánuco, Peru, consisted of a poorly equipped one-room health post staffed by an auxiliary nurse and visited by few patients. Then in 1994 the primary health care facility in Las Moras and about 250 others throughout the country were incorporated into a new government-community partnership for the delivery, management, financing and monitoring of primary health care services, called the Shared Administration Program. The program formed committees of locally elected community members, called “Comunidades Locales de Administración de Salud” (CLAS), into private non-profit associations to collaboratively manage government funds for primary health care services. This presentation will give an overview of the CLAS approach and how since the inception of CLAS, Future Generations, a private non-profit organization, has worked with the government, civil society and local communities to design the CLAS system and build the capacity of government and communities to thrive within the CLAS framework.