Abstract
As growth in development assistance for health levels off, development assistance partners must make allocation decisions within tighter budget constraints. Furthermore, with the advent of comprehensive and comparable burden of disease and health financing estimates, empirical evidence can increasingly be used to direct funding to those most in need. In our ‘financing gaps framework’, we propose a new approach for harnessing information to make decisions about health aid. The framework was designed to be forward-looking, goal-oriented, versatile and customizable to a range of organizational contexts and health aims. Our framework brings together expected health spending, potential health spending and spending need, to orient financing decisions around international health targets. As an example of how the framework could be applied, we develop a case study, focused on global goals for child health. The case study harnesses data from the Global Burden of Disease 2013 Study, Financing Global Health 2015, the WHO Global Health Observatory and National Health Accounts. Funding flows are tied to progress toward the Sustainable Development Goal’s target for reductions in under-five mortality. The flexibility and comprehensiveness of our framework makes it adaptable for use by a diverse set of governments, donors, policymakers and other stakeholders. The framework can be adapted to short‐ or long‐run time frames, cross‐country or subnational scales, and to a number of specific health focus areas. Depending on donor preferences, the framework can be deployed to incentivize local investments in health, ensuring the long-term sustainability of health systems in low- and middle-income countries, while also furnishing international support for progress toward global health goals.
Highlights
As growth in development assistance for health (DAH) levels off, development assistance partners must increasingly make allocation decisions within tighter budget constraints (IHME 2016; Dieleman et al 2016)
In our ‘financing gaps framework’, we propose a new approach for harnessing information to make decisions about health aid
We propose a ‘financing gaps framework’ that conceptualizes the allocation of development assistance for health based on empirical estimates of the gaps among three health financing trajectories: needed resources, expected spending and potential spending into 2030
Summary
As growth in development assistance for health (DAH) levels off, development assistance partners must increasingly make allocation decisions within tighter budget constraints (IHME 2016; Dieleman et al 2016). This entails difficult trade-offs among competing priorities and honing in on the specific challenges and countries most in need. The availability of comprehensive and comparable burden of disease and health financing estimates means new information can be incorporated into the allocation of DAH (Murray et al 2015) Because of these factors, this is an apt moment to consider how new approaches could align funding flows with need.
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