Global Aid For Health Hits Record High As Funding Sources Shift

By Jason Beaubien

Published April 8, 2014 at 12:01 PM EDT

A pregnant Somali woman gets a tetanus shot at a clinic in Mogadishu in 2013. The vaccination initiative was launched by the GAVI Alliance, UNICEF and the World Health Organization.

International development aid has hit an all-time high, despite some nations dramatically slashing their foreign assistance budgets. As patterns of international assistance shift, an increasing amount of money is being invested in improving health in the developing world.

Donors from wealthy nations, aid groups, U.N. agencies and other charitable organizations spent $31.3 billion in 2013 on health projects in the developing world, according to a new analysis from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington.

The numbers, published online Tuesday in the journal Health Affairs, reflect a shifting funding landscape in which nonprofits, public-private partnerships and large foundations — mainly the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation — now overshadow the influence of regional development banks and other traditional funders.

Some of the biggest jumps in spending came from issue-focused agencies.

The GAVI Alliance, for example, which supports vaccination, disbursed $1.5 billion in 2013 — 32 percent higher than the year before.

The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria boosted its distributions by roughly 17 percent, pouring $4 billion in to programs primarily in Africa.

At the same time the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development says overall international aid rebounded last year to a new high. The OECD says rich nations dedicated $134.8 billion to foreign development assistance in 2013.

While the U.S. government continues to be the largest donor for all types of development assistance globally, American spending on international health declined by almost $1 billion — from $8.3 billion in 2012 to $7.4 billion in 2013.

The U.K. posted a dramatic 28 percent boost in development spending last year, as it increased assistance to reach a U.N. Millennium Development Goal of allocating .7 percent of gross domestic product to international aid by the year 2015.

Here's a cool interactive graphic on international aid that lets you compare trends in giving, country by country:

The new analysis finds that the big losers down the road could be middle-income countries such as Mexico, India and Brazil, as donors focus more of their resources on the poorest of the poor.