Is global health aid distributed fairly?

Billions of lives are affected by decisions about which countries get how much global health aid. But the processes by which these decisions are made are often opaque and may be based on unreliable metrics.

In an editorial in a February 2018 supplement in the journal Health Policy and Planning, Jesse Bump, executive director of the Takemi Program in International Health and lecturer on global health policy at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, argued that agencies involved in global health aid distribution should be more transparent about how the aid is allocated, and that aid should be allocated more equitably.

He also noted that although Gross National Income per capita has long been used as a central consideration in allocation, it is an unreliable metric in many low- and middle-income countries.

The supplement included five articles exploring various aspects of global health aid distribution. In addition to writing the editorial, Bump wrote an overview of the supplement and was a co-author for one of the articles. Other Harvard Chan contributors to the supplement included John-Arne Røttingen, adjunct professor of global health and population, and Annie Haakenstad, doctoral student in the Department of Global Health and Population.