Health
- Wed Jul 04 2007
Source:
Gender Action
By Suzanna Dennis and Elaine Zuckerman
A new report by Gender Action demonstrates a decline in World Bank funding for reproductive health and HIV/AIDS in recent years and very little spending by the African Development Bank, Asian Development Bank, and Inter-American Development Bank on these themes.
Gender Action presents the first report : Mapping Multilateral Development Banks' (MDBs') Reproductive Health and HIV/AIDS Spending on the quantity and quality of all MDB spending for reproductive health and HIV/AIDS. The report demonstrates a decline in World Bank and little African Development Bank, Asian Development Bank, and Inter-American Development Bank spending on reproductive health and HIV/AIDS. It charts unmet International Financial Institutions (IFI) commitments to reproductive health and HIV/AIDS, and juxtaposes how harmful IFI loan "conditionalities" such as restricting public spending undermine governments' ability to address these public health imperatives. Gender Action plans to expand this project with deeper analysis and especially advocacy.
The report could not be timelier. It comes in the wake of advocacy this spring by the reproductive health and rights community around the World Bank’s new Health, Nutrition and Population Strategy which threatened to eliminate the Bank’s 30 year old support for reproductive health. Gender Action helped coordinate the emergency response from civil society, which led key members of the World Bank’s Executive Directors to reject the draft and restore commitment to family planning. The approved strategy, however, relegates discussion of reproductive health toward the end. It takes a retrograde position on health service user fees reversing the Bank’s previous position to eliminate them. Mapping provides important evidence for conducting advocacy to improve MDB performance on achieving reproductive health, HIV/AIDS and other Millennium Development Goals.
Present research has revealed some startling trends in Multilateral Development Bank (MDB) funding for reproductive health and HIV/AIDS and the quality of their investments. The largest funder for both reproductive health and HIV/AIDS —the World Bank— is diminishing its funding. This is occurring simultaneously when conservative political appointees are trying to weaken World Bank commitments and investments in reproductive health. The other MDBs that fund reproductive health and HIV/AIDS projects provide relatively little support, in particular, the Inter-American and the Asian Development Banks provide very little funding for reproductive health, and African Development Bank provide astonishingly few resources for reproductive health and HIV/AIDS. These findings confirm existing research that ‘donor’ policies include gender equality goals, but these commitments often evaporate or disappear in budget allocations.
Despite Multilateral Development Banks' (MDBs) commitments to provide reproductive health services and prevent the spread of HIV, MDBs and the International Monetary Fund have a number of policies and practices that undermine meeting these commitments and undercut their promises to help countries achieve the Millenium Development Goals.
The report can be downloaded here
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