The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in a double shock - health and economic. As of March 1, 2021, COVID-19 has cost more than 2.5 million lives and triggered an economic recession surpassing any economic downturn since World War II.
Part I of this paper explores the impact of this current macro-fisc...al outlook on the three primary sources of health spending. Drawing on experiences from previous economic crises, scenario analyses suggest a fall in government per capita spending on health in 2021 and 2022 unless governments make bold choices to increase the share of health in general government spending.
Part II of the paper discusses policy options to meet the spending needs in health. These options encompass strategies to make fiscal adjustments work and channel funds where they are most needed, as well as policies to stabilize the balance sheets of social health insurance (SHI) schemes. The paper explains how the health sector can play an active role in expanding fiscal space, contributing to tax reforms, most importantly pro-health taxes, and mobilizing and absorbing external financing, including debt relief.
more
The 2020 Financing for Sustainable Development Report, the fifth report of the Inter-agency Task Force on Financing for Development, provides a comprehensive assessment of the state of sustainable finance. Prepared by more than 60 agencies of the United Nations system and partner international organ...izations, the report brings together a wide range of expertise and perspectives. It puts forward a set of policy recommendations to mobilize financing flows, and align them with economic, social and environmental priorities. These recommendations should assist Member States and all other stakeholders as they work toward fully implementing the Addis Agenda and achieve the SDGs.
more
The 2021 Financing for Sustainable Development Report responds to the request made by Member States to review the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on nancing for sustainable development, and to propose recommendations to rebuild better. The report underlines the need for policy actions to ensure e e...ctive support until the recovery is rmly underway. Its thematic chapter discusses the systemic and interlinked nature of risk in a tightly intertwined world, and the importance of providing nancing for risk reduction and resilience and nancing that is risk-informed and resilient. With the collaboration of more than 60 agencies of the United Nations system and partner international organizations, the report provides much needed guidance to Member States to take action towards a more resilient future.
more
The 2022 Financing for Sustainable Development Report identifies a “great finance divide” as a main driver of the divergent recovery. Developed countries were able to borrow record sums at ultra-low interest rates to support their people and economies, but the pandemic response and investment in... recovery of poor countries was limited by fiscal constraints. This joint report, by over 60 agencies of the United Nations system and partner international organizations, provides analysis and puts forward policy recommendations to overcome this “finance divide” and enhance developing countries’ access to financing for recovery and productive and sustainable investment.
more
Dieser Bericht enthält eine neue Strategie für Investitionen in die Gesundheit als Beitrag zur Wirtschaftsentwicklung, vor allem in den ärmsten Ländern der Welt, auf der Grundlage einer neuen globalen Partnerschaft zwischen sich entwickelnden und entwickelten Ländern. Zügiges und mutiges Hande...ln könnte zum Ende dieser Dekade mindestens 8 Millionen
Menschenleben pro Jahr retten, die Lebensdauer und die Leistungsfähigkeit der Armen erhöhen und ihre wirtschaftliche Lage verbessern Hierfür wären zwei wichtige Initiativen zu ergreifen: eine deutliche Erhöhung der Mittel, die für Gesundheit ausgegeben werden,sowohl durch die armen Länder als auch durch die Geber und eine Beseitigung der nichtfinanziellen Hindernisse, die arme Länder in ihrer Fähigkeit zur Bereitstellung von Gesundheitsdiensten einschränken
more
The 2018 global health financing report presents health spending data for all WHO Member States between 2000 and 2016 based on the SHA 2011 methodology. It shows a transformation trajectory for the global spending on health, with increasing domestic public funding and declining external financing. T...his report also presents, for the first time, spending on primary health care and specific diseases and looks closely at the relationship between spending and service coverage
more
This paper introduces a new dataset of official financing—including foreign aid and other forms of concessional and non-concessional state financing—from China to 138 countries between 2000 and 2014. We use these data to investigate whether and to what extent Chinese aid affects economic growth ...in recipient countries. To account for the endogeneity of aid, we employ an instrumental-variables strategy that relies on exogenous variation in the supply of Chinese aid over time resulting from changes in Chinese steel production. Variation across recipient countries results from a country’s probability of receiving aid. Controlling for year- and recipient-fixed effects that capture the levels of these variables, their interaction provides a powerful and excludable instrument. Our results show that Chinese official development assistance (ODA) boosts economic growth in recipient countries. For the average recipient country, we estimate that one additional Chinese ODA project produces a 0.7 percentage point increase in economic growth two years after the project is committed. We also benchmark the effectiveness of Chinese aid vis-á-vis the World Bank, the United States, and all members of the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee (DAC).
more
Unfortunately, current data available on SDG financing are not sufficient to quantify the distribution of financing for the SDGs.
AidData’s methodology for measuring financing to the SDGs attempts to fill this gap by analyzing development project documentation to estimate project-level contributi...ons to the SDGs (and their associated targets). This methodology lets us see where development financing is targeted, allowing comparisons among SDG goals and individual SDG targets.
This methodology note describes two iterations of AidData’s methodology. The first, based on a crosswalk with existing aid reporting schemes, was employed for AidData’s 2017 flagship report Realizing Agenda 2030: Will donor dollars and country priorities align with global goals? and our brief Financing the SDGs in Colombia. The second iteration of the methodology employs a direct coding scheme, linking development projects directly to the SDGs through analysis and coding of project descriptions rather than through an intermediary classification system. This method was employed for our 2019 brief Financing the SDGs: Evidence in Four Countries.
more
The development of this draft Proposed programme budget 2022–2023 comes at a unique moment for WHO. The world is in the grip of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic and faces health, social and economic consequences on an unprecedented scale. Although it is not known when the COVID-19 pande...mic will end, recent encouraging vaccine results, in addition to the examples of countries that have achieved good results through public health measures, hold out the prospect of better days ahead. The full impact of the pandemic cannot yet be determined. But whatever its implications, the Secretariat will rise to the challenge and is ready to adapt so that it is fully equipped to support Member States for any eventuality in the future – to make sure that the world will never again have to face this kind of crisis.
more
Development finance institutions owned by European governments and the World Bank Group are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on expensive for-profit hospitals in the Global South that block patients from getting care, or bankrupt them, with some even imprisoning patients who cannot afford th...eir bills. At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, some of these same hospitals denied entry to patients suffering from the virus or sold intensive care beds at eyewatering prices to the highest bidder. These development institutions have woefully inadequate safeguards, invest via a complex web of tax-avoiding financial intermediaries, and offer little to zero evidence on the impacts their investments are having. Oxfam is calling on rich-country governments and the World Bank Group to immediately halt their spending on for-profit private healthcare, and for an urgent independent investigation to be conducted into all active and historic investments.
more
This report examines the support to private healthcare provision in India by the World Bank’s private sector arm, the International Finance Corporation (IFC). Despite supporting private healthcare in the country since 1997, no healthcare results for lending and investments have been disclosed sinc...e the start of these operations over twenty-five years ago. The IFC has overwhelmingly invested in high-end urban hospitals which are out of reach for the majority of Indians. Several have consistently failed to provide free healthcare to poor patients despite this being a condition under which free or subsidized public land was allotted to these hospitals. Supporting private healthcare in a context where 37% of Indians experience catastrophic health expenditures in private hospitals appears to run counter to the World Bank Group’s focus on poverty reduction. These investments do not contribute to the building of stronger healthcare infrastructure or respond to unmet healthcare needs. Only 14% of IFC-financed hospitals are located in the 10 states ranked lowest in terms of the overall performance of the health system. Furthermore, we found many instances where regulators upheld complaints pertaining to violations of patients’ rights by these hospitals including overcharging, denial of healthcare, price rigging, financial conflict of interest and medical negligence.
more
The burden of diabetes is enormous, positioning it as one of the main challenges facing public health today. Currently, it is estimated that 62 million people are living with diabetes in the Region of the Americas and projections show its prevalence will continue rising over the following years. The... Region shows the highest number of years of healthy life lost (through either disability or premature death) due to diabetes worldwide. The high costs associated with its treatment produce a heavy economic burden. Its complications can seriously affect the quality of life of people living with diabetes, their families, and society and overload health systems. This report shows the latest internationally comparable data on diabetes and its main risk factors by year, country, and sex.
more
La carga de la diabetes es enorme, posicionándola como uno de los principales desafíos que enfrenta la salud pública en la actualidad. Actualmente, se estima que 62 millones de personas viven con diabetes en la Región de las Américas y las proyecciones muestran que su prevalencia seguirá aumen...tando en los próximos años. La Región muestra el mayor número de años de vida saludable perdidos (ya sea por discapacidad o muerte prematura) debido a la diabetes en todo el mundo. Los altos costes asociados a su tratamiento producen una pesada carga económica. Sus complicaciones pueden afectar seriamente la calidad de vida de las personas que viven con diabetes, sus familias y la sociedad y sobrecargar los sistemas de salud. Este informe muestra los últimos datos comparables internacionalmente sobre la diabetes y sus principales factores de riesgo por año, país y sexo. También incluye un resumen de la respuesta de los sistemas de salud de los países a la diabetes, incluidos planes nacionales, objetivos, vigilancia, directrices y acceso a medicamentos y tecnologías esenciales, y sintetiza información sobre las complicaciones relacionadas con la diabetes y la estrecha relación entre la diabetes y otras patologías, como enfermedades cardiovasculares, tuberculosis y COVID-19.
more
The Advancing Climate-Resilient Education Technical Guidance builds on the USAID 2022–2030 Climate Strategy and the 2018 USAID Education Policy to support USAID Missions and partners who seek to integrate climate action and awareness into education programs and are committed to achieving climate-r...esilient education systems and fostering climate-resilient learners. It outlines how to identify opportunities for climate action that respond to known climate hazards through mitigative, adaptive, and transformative actions.
The guidance is designed for use at the activity design and monitoring and evaluation stages of the USAID Program Cycle. It does not prescribe new processes, but rather serves to aid Missions and partners in integrating climate considerations into existing processes
more
While there has been real progress in addressing the burden of disease in the WHO African region, the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the link between health, economics and security, as the region saw decades of progress threatened, including positive trends in decreasing inequality. In the Africa...n Region the momentum towards achieving the 2030 SDG disease burden reduction targets (SDG targets 3.3, 3.4 and 3B) has stalled.
The COVID-19 pandemic was also a major threat to gains made, such as the eradication of polio in the region, declared in 2020; reduced numbers of new HIV infections in 2021 compared to 2010; and passing the 2020 milestone of the End TB Strategy, with a 22% reduction in new cases compared with 2015. However, the pandemic also disrupted essential health services in 92% of countries globally, 22.7 million children missed basic immunization, there was an increase in malaria and TB, and global deaths from TB rose for the first time since 2015.
more
Previous advocacy efforts have achieved tangible goals in terms garnering political commitments
to increase financing for TB—as seen at the 2018 UN High-Level Meeting on TB. The challenge
now is to ensure that these commitments are actually met within a global biomedical research
ecosystem that... is designed and incentivized to prioritize the health needs of wealthy populations
more
Trustworthy, evidence-based health guidelines form the basis of national policies affecting both patients and health-care workers. Emphasizing the link between robust evidence and people’s trust in their health systems, Dr Hans Henri P. Kluge, WHO Regional Director for Europe said at the launch ev...ent, “Trust and transformation are key words for us, especially when we talk about improving and strengthening our health systems. Transformation should first and foremost serve the interests of patients and health-care workers”.
While it is not always easy to demonstrate the immediate effect of guidelines on people’s health, there is no viable alternative to utilizing guidelines based on the best available evidence.
Yet, developing robust guidelines remains a challenge for most countries. “Guidelines need to be both simple to use and timely, they need to address people’s real needs, especially at the local level, and should ultimately reflect the resources available,” said Dr Natasha Azzopardi-Muscat, Director, Country Health Policies and Systems, WHO/Europe. “This means that any successful guideline needs to be adjusted and adapted to local contexts and realities.”
more
The Water and Sanitation for Health Facility Improvement Tool (WASH FIT) presents a framework and acts as a guide to support multisectoral action to improve water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) in health care. Central to the WASH FIT methodology is training and incremental improvements.
Implementat...ion of WASH FIT requires six preparatory steps at the national level, one of which is conducting national sensitization and training of trainers, followed by facility-level training. At the facility level, step 1 (of five) involves establishing and training a WASH FIT team.
The WASH FIT methodology is outlined in WASH FIT: A practical guide for improving quality of care through water, sanitation and hygiene in health care facilities. Second edition. (the WASH FIT guide), which includes a set of templates designed to help users with each phase of the improvement cycle.
more
In In recent years, China has increased its international engagement in health. Nonetheless, the lack
of data on contributions has limited efforts to examine contributions from China. Existing estimates that track
development assistance for health (DAH) from China have relied primarily on one data...set. Furthermore, little is known
about the disbursing agencies especially the multilaterals through which contributions are disbursed and how these
are changing across time. In this study, we generated estimates of DAH from China from 2007 through 2017 and
disaggregated those estimates by disbursing agency and health focus area.
more
Sound periodic programme reviews provide opportunities for countries to objectively assess progress and take corrective action to sustain or get back on track towards achieving their medium and long-term programme goals. It reflects people’s diverse needs, enables efficient use of health system re...sources and improves the predictability, sustainability and transparency of the programmes.
This publication provides guidance to countries on how to perform programme reviews for HIV, viral hepatitis and sexually transmitted infections in this dynamic health sector context. The guidance encourages integrated reviews across health programmes for more efficient use of health system resources. The welfare of populations to be served must be at the centre of health programme reviews, with the overarching resolve to protect and promote health as a human right.
This guidance is intended for use by all national partners, including health ministries, related ministries, civil society, affected communities and other stakeholders, for participatory and evidence-informed programme reviews.
more