Responsive primary health care (PHC) ensures that health care services are available when they are required, even for the hardest-to-reach communities, it is responsive to people’s preferences, and people obtain the services and products they want and need. This is the core of VillageReach’s strategy: building responsive primary health care systems. Adopting these changes will require policy, practice and systems shifts, calling for partnerships with civil society, the private sector, political leaders and multilateral institutions to accelerate the transformative action needed for responsive PHC.