OUTCOME 4: Equitable provision of quality and essential social services ensure improved well-being for all vulnerable Groups.

It is within the social sectors where the UN will invest the largest amount of its funding organizing its interventions in the areas of Water and Sanitation, Housing, Social Protection, Education, Health and HIV and AIDS around two outcomes. UNDAF Outcome 4 aims at strengthening the capacities of the public institutions to provide quality and essential social services for vulnerable groups in these sectors, whereas UNDAF Outcome 5 aims at strengthening the capacity of right holders to demand access and use social services.

Within Outcome 4, the main focus will be on enhancing capacities of public institutions for a better service delivery. Thus, it envisages the equitable access to quality services in education, safe drinking water, health and nutrition, sanitation, housing and care for people living with HIV and AIDS. This will be complemented at the upstream level with advocacy through increased partnerships and engagement in sector programmes for the development, execution and systematic monitoring of policies, plans and budgets with a human rights, gender and equity perspective.

Specifically, they aim to:

• Enable public authorities and service providers at decentralized levels to deliver quality water supply and sanitation services in rural areas and improve informal settlements in peri-urban areas while supporting, in parallel, policy reform and participatory and accountable implementation mechanisms at the upstream level
• Strengthen national policies and standards on early learning, school quality and learner assessment.
• Ensure that relevant national strategies and evaluation mechanisms for pre- and in service teacher education and for literacy facilitators are in place. These should be complemented by the promotion of a multi-sectoral and holistic approach to education and early childhood development
• Improve the efficiency and effectiveness of social protection programs as an essential tool to promote inclusive economic growth
• Increase return on investment of social protection programmes through improved management and finance systems and enhanced linkages between the social protection programs, food security, HIV impact mitigation and Disaster Risk Reduction
• Enhance essential components of the national health systems, such as human resources, finance, information management ,procurement of medical products and technologies
• Increase the coverage of specific intervention packages for the prevention, treatment and care of malaria, tuberculosis, HIV and AIDS, neonatal and childhood diseases, emerging and neglected illnesses, as well as non communicable diseases
• Increase availability of quality, integrated and gender sensitive sexual and reproductive health services
• Enable the delivery of coordinated nutrition and food security services for the most vulnerable children and their families, such as people living with and affected by HIV and AIDS, in view of reducing chronic malnutrition
• Improve the provision and quality of integrated services for the prevention of HIV infection in newborns, youth and adults.

Programmes funded under this outcome include the CIDA-financed "Support to the National Integrated Plan to Achieve MDGs 4&5". The goal of this programme is to contribute to the reduction of maternal, newborn and child morbidity and mortality nationwide with a focus in Zambezia Province, by supporting the implementation of the National Integrated Plan to Achieve MDGs 4&5. Additional information on this programme is available in the Programme Document.