Access to quality diagnostics is constrained less by technology than by economics. Equipment is available. What is often missing is a business model in which someone is willing to own the asset, maintain it, and keep it running at volume.
Blended finance is useful here precisely because it changes who carries which risk. Public or concessional capital can absorb demand uncertainty and early-stage volume risk. Private capital can then take on operational delivery, where it is genuinely more efficient. The instrument works when that split reflects who is actually able to manage each risk.
The harder design work is governance. A public–private partnership platform for diagnostic services has to specify service standards, pricing, referral flows, data ownership, and what happens when volumes fall short. Those provisions determine whether the partnership survives its first difficult year.
We start from the same question in every structuring engagement: what would make a competent private operator commit capital here, and what would make a ministry confident that public priorities are protected? A structure that cannot answer both does not get built.