Global health funding: a glass half full?

摘要

With global health likely to be high on the agenda of this year's G8 Summit, starting today in St Petersburg, Russia, it is worth taking stock of international assistance funding trends and prospects. High-level attention to global health has risen markedly over the past two decades, particularly since 2000.One concrete measure of the priority placed on health by donors is the level of funding provided for the developing world. Previous analyses have shown that funding has been on the rise. Our analysis of data from 2000 to 2004 found a continuation of this trend, with donor funding for global health approaching USdollar14 billion in 2004-in part good news, as donors seem to have heeded the global health call. Still, funding for health falls far short of global need, as estimated, in part, by the WHO Commission on Macroeconomics and Health, which found that donors would need to provide an additional dollar22 billion a year by 2007 and dollar31 billion a year by 2015 to help finance the scaling-up of essential interventions, health-system development, and research and development devoted to the diseases of the poor.In addition, investments in health seem to be uneven, raising cautionary notes about the global community's ability to meet, let alone sustain, financing needs overtime.