What will the new World Bank head do for global health?

Background:Over the past decade gender mainstreaming has gained visibility at global health organisations. The World Bank, one of the largest funders of global health activities, released twoWorld Development Reportsshowcasing its gender policies, and recently announced a $1 billion initiative for women’s entrepreneurship. We summarise the development of the Bank’s gender policies and analyse its financing of gender projects in the health sector. This article is intended to provide background for future research on the Bank’s gender and global health portfolio.Methods:First, we constructed a timeline of the Bank’s gender policy development, through a review of published articles, grey literature, and Bank documents and reports. Second, we performed a health-focused analysis of publicly available Bank gender project databases, to track its financing of health sector projects with a gender ‘theme’ from 1985-2017.Results:The Bank’s gender policy developed through four major phases from 1972-2017: ‘women in development’ (WID), institutionalisation of WID, gender mainstreaming, and gender equality through ‘smart economics’. In the more inclusive Bank project database, projects with a gender theme comprised between 1.3% (1985-1989) and 6.2% (2010-2016) of all Bank commitments. Most funding targeted middle-income countries and particular health themes, including communicable diseases and health systems. Major gender-related trust funds were absent from both databases. The Bank reports that 98% of its lending is ‘gender informed’, which indicates that the gender theme used in its publicly available project databases is poorly aligned with its criteria for gender informed projects.Conclusion:The Bank focused most of its health sector gender projects on women’s and girls’ issues. It is increasingly embracing private sector financing of its gender activities, which may impact its poverty alleviation agenda. Measuring the success of gender mainstreaming in global health will require the Bank to release more information about its gender indicators and projects.

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The World Bank & financing tuberculosis control, 1986-2017

Wellcome Open Research ◽

10.12688/wellcomeopenres.14759.1 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 3 ◽

pp. 103

Author(s):

Manveer Rahi ◽

Genevie Fernandes ◽

Janelle Winters ◽

Devi Sridhar

Keyword(s):

Global Health ◽

World Bank ◽

Grey Literature ◽

Tuberculosis Control ◽

Financial Flows ◽

Mortality And Morbidity ◽

The World Bank ◽

The World ◽

Health Database ◽

Public Partnerships

Background: Tuberculosis (TB) is among the leading contributors to global mortality and morbidity from infectious diseases and has had a major socioeconomic cost in recent history. The World Bank is a leading institution for global health governance and financing, but little research has concentrated on the role of the World Bank in global tuberculosis control. Methods: We tracked the development of the World Bank’s policies and associated financial flows for tuberculosis control. First, we performed a scoping review of both published and grey literature. Second, we used the Bank’s Projects & Operations database to construct a dataset of all World Bank projects with funding allocated to the “Tuberculosis” theme from 1986 to 2017. Finally, we analysed the World Bank’s funding patterns alongside wider funding for tuberculosis using the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation’s Development Assistance for Health database. Results: We identified four periods in the World Bank’s involvement in global tuberculosis control, from the recognition of tuberculosis as a global health issue to the creation of a global coalition against tuberculosis. Between 1986 and 2017 the World Bank undertook 79 projects with financing from its core lending divisions with a tuberculosis control theme or focus. Within the 79 projects the Bank committed 19.6% of funding, or $0.9bn, towards tuberculosis control. The World Bank has been involved in increasingly vertical programming with a growing proportion of project funding invested into tuberculosis control over time. However, after the formation of private-public partnerships against tuberculosis in 2002 such as the Global Fund to Fight HIV/AIDS, TB and Malaria, the Bank’s core financing decreased and private-public partnerships provided increasing levels of substitutive financing for tuberculosis control. Conclusions: The World Bank has been pivotal in leading global financing, garnering advocacy and creating widespread coalition in the battle against tuberculosis control in recent decades.

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Metric partnerships: global burden of disease estimates within the World Bank, the World Health Organisation and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation

Wellcome Open Research ◽

10.12688/wellcomeopenres.15011.2 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 4 ◽

pp. 35

Author(s):

Marlee Tichenor ◽

Devi Sridhar

Keyword(s):

Global Health ◽

World Bank ◽

Burden Of Disease ◽

Historical Context ◽

World Health Organisation ◽

World Health ◽

Global Burden Of Disease ◽

Global Burden ◽

The World Bank ◽

The World

The global burden of disease study—which has been affiliated with the World Bank and the World Health Organisation (WHO) and is now housed in the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME)—has become a very important tool to global health governance since it was first published in the 1993 World Development Report. In this article, based on literature review of primary and secondary sources as well as field notes from public events, we present first a summary of the origins and evolution of the GBD over the past 25 years. We then analyse two illustrative examples of estimates and the ways in which they gloss over the assumptions and knowledge gaps in their production, highlighting the importance of historical context by country and by disease in the quality of health data. Finally, we delve into the question of the end users of these estimates and the tensions that lie at the heart of producing estimates of local, national, and global burdens of disease. These tensions bring to light the different institutional ethics and motivations of IHME, WHO, and the World Bank, and they draw our attention to the importance of estimate methodologies in representing problems and their solutions in global health. With the rise in the investment in and the power of global health estimates, the question of representing global health problems becomes ever more entangled in decisions made about how to adjust reported numbers and to evolving statistical science. Ultimately, more work needs to be done to create evidence that is relevant and meaningful on country and district levels, which means shifting resources and support for quantitative—and qualitative—data production, analysis, and synthesis to countries that are the targeted beneficiaries of such global health estimates.

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Metric partnerships: global burden of disease estimates within the World Bank, the World Health Organisation and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation

Wellcome Open Research ◽

10.12688/wellcomeopenres.15011.1 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 4 ◽

pp. 35 ◽

Cited By ~ 9

Author(s):

Marlee Tichenor ◽

Devi Sridhar

Keyword(s):

Global Health ◽

World Bank ◽

Burden Of Disease ◽

Historical Context ◽

World Health Organisation ◽

World Health ◽

Global Burden Of Disease ◽

Global Burden ◽

The World Bank ◽

The World

The global burden of disease study—which has been affiliated with the World Bank and the World Health Organisation (WHO) and is now housed in the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME)—has become a very important tool to global health governance since it was first published in the 1993 World Development Report. In this article, based on literature review of primary and secondary sources as well as field notes from public events, we present first a summary of the origins and evolution of the GBD over the past 25 years. We then analyse two illustrative examples of estimates and the ways in which they gloss over the assumptions and knowledge gaps in their production, highlighting the importance of historical context by country and by disease in the quality of health data. Finally, we delve into the question of the end users of these estimates and the tensions that lie at the heart of producing estimates of local, national, and global burdens of disease. These tensions bring to light the different institutional ethics and motivations of IHME, WHO, and the World Bank, and they draw our attention to the importance of estimate methodologies in representing problems and their solutions in global health. With the rise in the investment in and the power of global health estimates, the question of representing global health problems becomes ever more entangled in decisions made about how to adjust reported numbers and to evolving statistical science. Ultimately, more work needs to be done to create evidence that is relevant and meaningful on country and district levels, which means shifting resources and support for quantitative—and qualitative—data production, analysis, and synthesis to countries that are the targeted beneficiaries of such global health estimates.

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