Ama Fenny

Prof. Ama Pokuaa Fenny is an Associate Professor with the Institute of Statistical, Social and Economics Research (ISSER) at the University of Ghana. She is a health economist whose research focuses on the evaluation of health and development programs in low- and middle-income country settings. In these settings, she studies the role of health financing strategies in offering social protection to vulnerable groups, targeted health system strategies to improve health seeking behavior and costing and cost-effectiveness methods that address efficiency of health programmes. Her current research focuses on the evaluation of child and adolescent health interventions and the integration of governmental policies into service delivery systems in Africa. At ISSER, Prof. Fenny provides leadership and oversight to projects involving research, project implementation, technical assistance and policy advocacy across a range of subjects. 

She has several years of practical experience; lending her technical expertise to the Ministry of Health in Ghana and several other national and international agencies. She has also carried out a number of costing, expenditure tracking surveys and health expenditure reviews with country experience across West and East Africa (Gambia, Liberia, Eriteria, Mozambique among others). In 2016, she was accepted as a West Africa Global Health Leaders Fellow, with the Centre on Global Health Security, Chatham House. Her research with the centre focused on how the poor could be integrated into social health insurance programs in Sub Saharan African countries. Subsequently, she has been engaged actively in the development of strategies to improve health systems performance and governance to achieve Universal Health Coverage (UHC) in Ghana. In 2020, she served as a member of the Africa Health Agenda International Conference (AHAIC) Commission which was responsible for creating a comprehensive report on the State of UHC in Africa. She has a PhD in Health Economics from the Department of Public Health, Aarhus University, Denmark and an MSc in Health, Population & Society from the London School of Economics & Political Science (UK).