Ireland is fourth highest in health aid spend overseas

IRELAND HAS the fourth highest rate of spending on health aid for developing countries in the world, new figures reveal.

Ireland also recorded the highest increase in spending on health development aid, increasing its spend 60-fold between 1990 and 2007, according to research funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

In 2007, the year before large cuts were introduced to Ireland’s development aid budget, Ireland spent $261 million (€188.9 million) on health in developing countries.

That constitutes about 0.1 per cent of GNP. Only Norway, Luxembourg and Sweden recorded per capita spend.

The US, which donates by far the biggest amount, spent 0.073 per cent of its national income on health aid overseas.

The figures were collated by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington and were published in The Lancet. They show that funding for health in developing countries quadrupled over the past two decades – from €4 billion in 1990 to €15.7 billion in 2007.

Private donors are shifting the paradigm for global health aid away from governments and agencies like the World Bank and the United Nations and making up an increasingly large piece of the health assistance pie – 30 per cent in 2007. But health aid does not always reach either the poorest or unhealthiest countries.

The foundation, set up by Gates, the world’s richest man, tops the list of private foundations providing global health aid, making up nearly 4 per cent of all health assistance in 2007.

Ireland was among the most transparent countries when it comes to its health aid spending. Nearly a third of health aid spending from the US was unaccounted for while most of Ireland’s development aid for health was traceable.

In 2007, about a quarter (23 per cent) of Ireland’s development aid for health went directly to its bilateral agencies and then on to governments of developing countries.

According to a study of aid given between 2001 and 2005, the biggest recipients of Irish health aid were Mozambique with €38.6 million, Uganda at €31.5 million, Tanzania with €24.9 million and Zambia at €22.2 million.

Last month an OECD study praised Ireland for “leading the way” among EU states in the proportion of overseas aid spent on combating HIV/Aids.