Health is one of the largest and most complex aid sectors: 16 percent of all aid went to the health sector in 2009. While many stress the importance of aid effectiveness, there are limited quantitative analyses of the quality of health aid, and various studies point out to the failure of health aid to increase health outcomes.
In this study, Denizhan Duran and Amanda Glassman apply Nancy Birdsall and Homi Kharas’s Quality of Official Development Assistance (QuODA) methodology to rank 30 donors across 23 indicators of aid effectiveness in health. Their indicators rely on the premise that health aid effectiveness would increase through increased donor efficiency, reduced burden on recipients, support to local institutions, and transparent reporting practices.
By ranking donors across these indicators, the authors seek to point out best practices in health aid and hold donors accountable for their performance. Some donors perform better on health than they do in other sectors. This paper tracks donors’ progress from 2008 to 2009, compares health to overall aid, and calls on donors to make available transparent and relevant aid data in the sector level and to focus on impact and results.
Data disclosure: The data and Stata code underlying this analysis are available as a data set.
