WHO funding priorities examined

Citation

(2009), "WHO funding priorities examined", Disaster Prevention and Management, Vol. 18 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/dpm.2009.07318bab.005

WHO funding priorities examined

Article Type: News items From: Disaster Prevention and Management, Volume 18, Issue 2

The World Health Organization’s budget is going to the wrong priorities in Africa and the Western Pacific region, according to research published in The Lancet in November.

Oxford University sociologist David Stuckler and colleagues found that while 96 percent of WHO’s funding in Africa is directed toward infectious diseases, infectious diseases there cause only 72 percent of the deaths and 74 percent of the long-term disability. Non-communicable disease in Africa causes 21 percent of deaths, and 18 percent of disability, but receives only three percent of WHO’s funding. Injuries and violence on the continent cause seven percent of the deaths, but get less than 1 percent of the agency’s money.

The figures are even starker in the Western Pacific region, where infectious disease claims 86 percent of the funds, but causes only 14 percent of the deaths. Non-communicable disease cause 75 percent of the deaths there, but gets only 13 percent of the organization’s funds.

The research was prepared in anticipation of the global health priorities meeting in Bamako, Mali, in November 2008. The authors conclude, “Decision makers at Bamako should consider the implications of the present misalignment of global health priorities and disease burden for health research worldwide.” Stuckler says, “Our dim view, as expressed in the paper, was that Bamako’s outcome would be ‘business-as-usual.’” While at times the rhetoric may change about priorities, until this translates into an actual change in financial allocations, it is hard to believe. Further, changes in priorities based on what is fashionable in global health rather than what is optimal from a public health standpoint can do more harm than good. “In the paper, we tried to stress the point that the issue is not so much about achieving specific changes in priority, or as one colleague of mine likes to say, ‘shifting deck chairs on a sinking Titanic,’ but rather about finding ways to empower recipients of the global health funds to have a voice in determining how the global health priorities are set,” he says.

“We need democracy and accountability in global health, as we do in many other social problems. It would be presumptuous to think that I could choose who lives and who dies, and from what they are dying, around the world from a comfy spot in Oxford. Yet that is precisely what the global health financing system is accomplishing.”