World Bank and IMF hampering Aids funding
Ted Schrecker of the University of Ottawa and Gorik Ooms of Médecins Sans Frontières in Brussels, write expenditure ceilings for public health, created by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), stop countries from benefiting from outside investment in their health programmes.
To receive debt relief countries must provide the IMF and World Bank with a poverty reduction strategy.
Most strategies include spending targets or ceilings for various sectors of government activity. These ceilings exist because of concerns that rapid inflows of foreign exchange associated with increased aid can drive up the value of the recipient country’s currency. The result would be to increase the price of exports, thereby undermining competitiveness.
However, ceilings create a clear disincentive for external donors to offer desperately needed financing, state Schrecker and Ooms.
This is because the IMF requires that countries include the value of all new donor funding received for initiatives, such as scaling up antiretroviral treatment, in their health budgets.
If a sector receives any new funds that were not initially budgeted for, a comparable amount must be cut from the budget.
The authors use the situation in Uganda as an example of the effect of expenditure ceilings.
In September 2004, the IMF claimed no funds for HIV/AIDS projects had been rejected by Uganda because of expenditure limitations, while conceding that only US$18,6-million of the $201-million approved for Uganda by the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria had been disbursed.
The authors comment: ‘[The existence of public health expenditure ceilings] reveals the dark underside of the industrialised world’s grand rhetoric about improving the health of the poor.
‘At the very least, the World Bank and the IMF owe the developing world an unequivocal commitment that they will be part of a solution to the health funding problem, instead of perpetuating it.’
Author
-
Health-e News is South Africa's dedicated health news service and home to OurHealth citizen journalism. Follow us on Twitter @HealtheNews
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Unless otherwise noted, you can republish our articles for free under a Creative Commons license. Here’s what you need to know:
-
You have to credit Health-e News. In the byline, we prefer “Author Name, Publication.” At the top of the text of your story, include a line that reads: “This story was originally published by Health-e News.” You must link the word “Health-e News” to the original URL of the story.
-
You must include all of the links from our story, including our newsletter sign up link.
-
If you use canonical metadata, please use the Health-e News URL. For more information about canonical metadata, click here.
-
You can’t edit our material, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style. (For example, “yesterday” can be changed to “last week”)
-
You have no rights to sell, license, syndicate, or otherwise represent yourself as the authorized owner of our material to any third parties. This means that you cannot actively publish or submit our work for syndication to third party platforms or apps like Apple News or Google News. Health-e News understands that publishers cannot fully control when certain third parties automatically summarise or crawl content from publishers’ own sites.
-
You can’t republish our material wholesale, or automatically; you need to select stories to be republished individually.
-
If you share republished stories on social media, we’d appreciate being tagged in your posts. You can find us on Twitter @HealthENews, Instagram @healthenews, and Facebook Health-e News Service.
You can grab HTML code for our stories easily. Click on the Creative Commons logo on our stories. You’ll find it with the other share buttons.
If you have any other questions, contact info@health-e.org.za.
World Bank and IMF hampering Aids funding
by healthe, Health-e News
May 19, 2005