The RTA covered UNICEF’s response to COVID-19 from March 2020 – when WHO declared the disease a pandemic – until January 2021. Further, the RTA applied a broad and cross-cutting lens to all 21 UNICEF county offices across the region, focusing on six case study countries: Kenya, Madagascar, Nam...ibia, Somalia, South Africa and Uganda.
In addition to a Regional Analysis Report, the RTA produced six deep-dive reports with findings and lessons specific to the six case study countries mentioned above – all of which can be accessed through the drop-down listing on this page.
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Tropical Medicine and Infectious Disease 2017, 2(4), 50
This is a cross-sectional analysis of baseline data in a longitudinal study on asymptomatic, LF antigen-positive and -negative young people in Myanmar. Rapid field screening was used to identify antigen-positive cases and a group of antige...n-negative controls of similar age and gender were invited to continue in the study. ... Results demonstrate that sub-clinical changes associated with infection can be detected in asymptomatic cases. Further exploration of these low-cost devices in clinical and research settings on filariasis-related lymphedema are warranted.
https://doi.org/10.3390/tropicalmed2040050
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With the COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing energy and cost-of-living crises, many OECD countries have had to face significant economic and societal challenges over the last five years. The succession of crises has had important implications for health systems and the available resources allocated to... health. This policy brief examines the recent trends in health spending and discusses what is driving the latest spending trajectory.
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Overall, harmonisation and innovation should be the
focus of the future direction of DAH and the creation of
a healthy global community. The world needs all hands
on deck if it were to move towards achieving the SDGs,
addressing global health inequalities and improving the
welfare of the global... population, while ensuring that no
one is left behind.
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Insufficient funding is hindering the achievement of malaria elimination targets in Africa, despite the pressing need for increased investment in malaria control. While Western donors attribute their inaction to financial constraints, the global health community has limited knowledge of China’s ex...panding role in malaria prevention. This knowledge gap arises from the fact that China does not consistently report its foreign development assistance activities to established aid transparency initiatives. Our work focuses on identifying Chinese-funded malaria control projects throughout Africa and linking them to official data on malaria prevalence. By doing so, we aim to shed light on China’s contributions to malaria control efforts, analysing their investments and assessing their impact. This would provide valuable insights into the development of effective financing mechanisms for future malaria control in Africa.
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The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated that
the world was not well prepared to respond
to an infectious disease threat of this magnitude. Countries across all socioeconomic and development categories have struggled
to implement effective national responses. Substantial amounts of additional investmen...t are required to support the development of country capacities to prevent, detect and respond to both existing and emerging
infectious disease threats. Prior research efforts have estimated that between US$96 and $204billion is required, globally, to
advance country-level health security capacities, with US$63–131billion needed over a 3-year period. Given the substantial costs
of ongoing COVID-19 response, estimated to
be over US$12.5trillion through 2024, and an estimated 12.1–22.7million excess deaths, globally, due to COVID-19 as of January 2022,
the importance and potential return on investment of such upfront investments in capacity building are more evident than ever before.
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In contrast to bilateral aid, aid disbursed from
multilateral institutions increased significantly at the onset
of the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet, at a time when a coherent
and effective multilateral response is needed most, the
COVID-19 pandemic revealed a shifting landscape of donor
agencies that... struggle with basic functions, such as crossnational coordination. While multilaterals are uniquely
positioned to transcend national priorities and respond
to pandemics, functionally we find official development
assistance (ODA) from these entities may increasingly
mimic the attributes of bilateral aid. We explore three
important, but not comprehensive, attributes of aid leading
up to and during the COVID-19 pandemic: (1) earmarking,
(2) donor concentration and (3) aid modality.
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The relative priority received by issues
in global health agendas is subjected to impressionistic
claims in the absence of objective methods of assessment
of priority. To build an approach for conducting structured
assessments of comparative priority health issues receive,
we expand the public ...arenas model (2021) and offer a
framework for future assessments of health issue priority
in global and national health agendas.
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Rising levels of inflation, debt and macrofiscal tightening are putting expenditures on the social sectors including health under immense scrutiny. Already, there are worrying signs of reductions in social sector investments. However, even before the pandemic, evidence showed the significant returns... on investments in health equity and its social determinants. Emerging data and trends show that these potential returns have increased during the COVID-19 pandemic - investments in social determinants can mitigate widespread reductions in human capital and the increasing likelihood of costly syndemics, while promoting access to healthcare innovations that have thus far been inequitably distributed. Therefore, we argue that, despite immediate fiscal pressures, this is exactly the time to invest in health equity and its broader social determinants, as the returns on such investments have never been greater.
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The key tools and governance approaches for
international cooperation for sustainable development
(hereafter, international cooperation) were set up in a
markedly different time and age. International
cooperation – with official development assistance
(ODA) as the dominant means of implementa...tion –
remains key, despite being generally considered as no
longer adequate for addressing today’s common and
collective challenges.
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Development assistance for health (DAH)
plays a vital role in supporting health programmes in lowand middle-income countries. While DAH has historically
focused on infectious diseases and maternal and child
health, there is a lack of comprehensive analysis of DAH
trends, strategic shifts and the...ir impact on health systems
and outcomes. This study aims to provide a comprehensive
review of DAH from 1990 to 2022, examining its evolution
and funding allocation shifts.
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Most foreign aid comes in one of two forms: either we pay a person or an institution today in exchange for delivering some beneficial activity in the future, or we observe something bad happen to them and then give them support to recover from it. This kind of aid is simple to design and deliver,
b...ut in the former case has limits in how sharply it incentivizes success and effort from a range of actors and in the latter case leads to the inefficient and undignified “begging bowl” approach to humanitarian financing. In what follows, I identify a broad family of alternative approaches, which
can loosely be grouped together as “contractually contingent financing,” and explain why they are still relatively underused.
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Questions concerning the relevance and reform of official development assistance (ODA), and how ODA and broader development finance could—or should—change to better reflect shifting demands are not new, with academics and policymakers suggesting a range of options for reform. In this background ...note, we briefly review the major reform proposals from 2009 onwards, highlighting the key issues underlying approaches to ODA reforms, and the main “types” of proposals typically put forward.
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Frequent efforts to revise the official development assistance (ODA) accounting rules have raised important questions about the integrity and relevance of what currently “counts” as ODA spending. In this note, we outline a brief history of the evolution of the ODA accounting rules to date, highl...ighting how—and why—the ODA concept has changed since it emerged in 1969. Doing so provides a starting point for considering whether the current concept of ODA remains “fit for purpose” and whether, or how, the concept could reform to better meet current needs.
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This question bank is a menu of qualitative questions related to healthcare workers’ knowledge, perceptions and practices during infectious disease outbreaks. The question bank will generate qualitative data on healthcare workers’ subjective understandings of risks, case management, protection a...nd wider outbreak operations. These data can be used to inform risk communication and community engagement activities as well as other response pillars. Some of the issues covered in these questions are complex, for example stigma or views on vaccine safety
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Cette banque de questions est un menu de questions qualitatives relatives aux connaissances, aux perceptions et aux pratiques du personnel de santé lors d'épidémies de maladies infectieuses. La banque de questions générera des données qualitatives sur la compréhension subjective qu'ont les pr...ofessionnels de la santé des risques, de la gestion des cas, de la protection et des opérations plus larges en cas d'épidémie. Ces données peuvent être utilisées pour informer les activités de communication sur les risques et d'engagement communautaire, ainsi que d'autres piliers de la réponse. Certains des sujets abordés dans ces questions sont complexes, par exemple la stigmatisation ou les opinions sur la sécurité des vaccins.
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