RE-THINKING AID DISPLACEMENT IN THE HEALTH SECTOR

Tuesday, 22nd of May 2012

RE-THINKING AID DISPLACEMENT IN THE HEALTH SECTOR

Writing in The Lancet in 2010, Lu and colleagues argued that official development assistance to the health sector is displaced, so that health ministries reduce their spending in recipient programs by $0.43 for every dollar received. This article generated much discussion; see

http://www.scopus.com/results/citedbyresults.url?sort=plf-f&cite=2-s2.077950861532&src=s&imp=t&sid=LaZrfkFdNqaWp8jwzZScsGA%3a30&sot=cite&sdt=a&sl=0&origin=inward&txGid=LaZrfkFdNqaWp8jwzZScsGA%3a2

Writing in PLOS Medicine, two authors from Stanford seek to rebut those views. Summary is below; full text is at http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.1001214

Summary Points

At the core of the current aid debate is the question of whether development assistance for health provided to developing country governments increases health expenditures.

It has recently been suggested that development assistance for health to governments leads to a displacement of government spending, reinforcing skepticism about health aid.

Here we examine a database of public financing for health from 1995 to 2006 and demonstrate that prior conclusions drawn from these data are unstable and driven by outliers.

While government spending may be displaced by development assistance for health in some settings, the evidence is not robust and is highly variable across countries. We recommend that current evidence about aid displacement cannot be used to guide policy.

‘Kilifi DHSS is the largest population (260,000) under surveillance in tropical Africa for births, death, pregnancy and migration. The unique featue of KDHSS is that it was designed from the outset to link with morbidity surveillance at a district hospital/clinical research centre. The focus of research work has been on the incidence of infectious disesases in children,defining risk factors including genetic risks, and interventions to prevent infectious diseases – particularly vaccines.’

The NLM homepage lists 548 publications from Kilifi, most of them open source. How many university departments are this prolific?

International Journal of Epidemiologyije.oxfordjournals.org