ODA for health by Subsectors
In principle, the fulfilment of the human right to "the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health" (International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, Art. 12) demands political and financial efforts to guarantee effective services of prevention, treatment and rehabilitation for all diseases and conditions benefitting all people at all ages. On the way to achieve this goal and mobilize the necessary resources, however, it may be consistent with basic principles of justice to prioritize those health threats that cause high mortality rates in earlier stages of life. Furthermore, the crude reality often poses the necessity to confront specific health problems in order to counteract the social discrimination of populations made vulnerable to or affected by these ailments. The global HIV epidemic represents one of the most striking challenges in this regard, considering the fact that in 2010, notwithstanding substantial progress of providing access to antiretroviral treatment, out of every six deaths that occurred worldwide in the age group 25 to 39 years one was caused by HIV (calculated on the basis of IHME, GBD Cause Patterns). And still, many decision-makers and service providers tend to discriminate against key populations and people living with HIV violating their human rights and impeding a rational response to the epidemic. For obvious reasons, the elimination of avoidable child mortality is a mainstay of health promotion from the point of view of social justice.
Therefore, our research strives to identify and to quantify the funding streams in support of the response to these particular health problems. For the bilateral cooperation of European DAC member countries the research determined the resource flows for relevant subsectors, such as specific HIV interventions, projects of reproductive health (comprehensive approaches that include HIV control), sector-wide programmes, child health, immunization and other health problems. For multilateral organizations and Germany’s bilateral aid the health-relevant activities and components were further classified in sub-categories that permit to estimate the financial assistance for child health as defined in MDG 4 (to see the more detailed results please follow this link).
Looking at bilateral cooperation in 2012 the United Kingdom provided the highest amounts of funding for all six subsectors. The country with the largest economy in Europe, Germany, only ranked second in the majority of the studied areas, while the German bilateral cooperation for reproductive health and child health including immunization took the third place. All 17 donors allocated the highest share of their bilateral health assistance to sector-wide approaches, which accounted for nearly half of the respective flows provided by European DAC members combined. Taking the disbursements made by European bilateral agencies and health-relevant multilateral organizations together (the latter funded by European as well as non-European donors) amounting to 10.4 billion US$, sector programmes also received the highest proportion with more than 28% of the total. The subsectors of specific HIV interventions, child health and reproductive health accounted for close to 24%, 16% and 8% of these financial flows under review.
How to use:
Click on the items in the legend if you wish to add or remove them and thereby create your own chart, e.g. to view and compare ODA disbursements in support of specific subsectors. Move the cursor to the respective column and area to see certain values.