It’s hard to believe that we at the Center for Policy Impact in Global Health have let a whole year go by without posting a policy blog (our last one was in October 2024!). It’s been a busy year, but we’re now coming up for air and we’ve made a commitment to start publishing a Policy Blog at least monthly.
Today, I’m really delighted to announce that we published a new report, commissioned by the Kiel Institute, a think tank based in Kiel, Germany, called “Can Development Assistance for Health Mutually Benefit Donors and Recipient Countries?” This year, several donors made large cuts in their official development assistance (ODA) for health, accompanied by other shocks to the global health system, such as geopolitical fragmentation, a retreat from multilateralism, climate-driven health crises, and massive human displacement from conflicts. While the impact of the cuts in health ODA on public health in recipient countries has received widespread political, advocacy, and media attention, much less attention has been paid to how these declines could affect donors. In our new report, we therefore set out to examine the research evidence on whether health ODA can have so-called “mutual benefits” on both recipients and donors.
In their terrific summary of our paper, the Kiel Institute’s Tobias Heidland and Rainer Thiele note that our paper provides robust evidence of the mutual benefits of health ODA. They state:
“The authors identify three main channels of mutual benefit for donor countries:
🔸 Health & security: reduced cross-border risks from pandemics and antimicrobial resistance, with preparedness spending far cheaper than expected future losses.
🔸Economic gains: support for trade, resilient supply chains and substantial returns to public investment in global health R&D, including jobs and innovation in donor economies.
🔸 Political & geopolitical returns: stronger governance and stability in partner countries, enhanced soft power, and lower migration pressures through better access to public services such as health and education.”
I should also note that we undertook this analysis at a time when the limitations of health ODA, and its harms, are undergoing renewed scrutiny. For example, aid dependence and volatility can leave low- and middle-income countries vulnerable to health shocks and disease resurgence, and aid sanctions can cause sharp increases in child and maternal mortality. Health ODA can lead to siloed projects and health system fragmentation and inefficiency. Nevertheless, our paper provides evidence that while cutting health ODA may yield short-term fiscal savings, it can cause major harms in recipient countries and also “increases long-term risks for donors’ own health security, economic resilience and international influence,” say Heidland and Thiele.
While there is clearly an important ongoing role for health ODA, the rapid changes in global health assistance—including the sharp decline in funding levels—is sparking important discussions about what this role should be and how health ODA should best be targeted. We hope our paper will assist donor governments in quantifying the value of their health aid investments and helping to shape health aid portfolios in an era of rising fiscal pressures.
- Gavin Yamey