Institute Director Christopher Murray and Lecturer Michael Hanlon detailed current trends in global health financing and provided insights into the future of health funding in a community meeting hosted by the Global Health Council in January.
“What’s happening to development assistance for health as the MDG deadline approaches?" drew a crowd of representatives from government agencies, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and charity groups to the Global Health Council’s offices in Washington, DC on January 19, 2012.
Dr. Murray and Dr. Hanlon were joined by Dr. Cristian Baeza, Director of Health, Nutrition, and Population at the World Bank, and the meeting was moderated by Smita Baruah, Interim co-CEO at the Global Health Council. The speakers discussed findings from IHME’s research in Health Affairs and in the policy report Financing Global Health 2011: Continued Growth as MDG Deadline Approaches. The discussion explored:
- How the economic slowdown is influencing the rate of growth in development assistance for health (DAH)
- Which channels of assistance are increasing health spending and which are cutting back
- Whether funding for specific health focus areas – such as HIV/AIDS, noncommunicable diseases, and maternal, newborn, and child health – are thriving or faltering
- How the distribution of DAH across countries corresponds with disease burden
- How developing country governments respond with their own health funding to increases and decreases in DAH
Dr. Murray noted that one important bellwether to watch is the recovery of funding of NGOs in recent years. In Financing Global Health 2010, the authors noted that funding of NGOs started to drop, but funding has since rebounded. Three other important trends were identified by Dr. Hanlon, who explained that funding for malaria and tuberculosis programs has continued to increase while funding for HIV/AIDS programs has leveled off.
Dr. Baeza emphasized the increasing need to link financing with results and said that the global health funding slowdown would make it difficult for countries to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). He encouraged a broader collaboration on helping countries move toward the MDGs. Dr. Baeza later captured some of these thoughts in a piece for the World Bank’s Investing In Health blog, titled Putting Humpty Dumpty back together again.
View the webinar from the event and learn how the shifts in DAH may affect progress to reach the MDG targets as the 2015 deadline draws near.
