5.1 Introduction Health financing is fundamental to the ability of health systems to maintain and improve human welfare. At the extreme, without the necessary funds no health workers would be employed, no medicines would be available and no health promotion or prevention would take place. However, financing is much more than a simple generation of funds (see Box 5.1). To understand the nature of indicators that can be used to monitor and evaluate health systems financing requires explicit assessment of what it is expected to achieve.