This conference served as a platform whereby many professionals networked, shared experiences and developed their skills and knowledge. Action for Global Health (AfGH) in collaboration with the Medical Mission Institute of Wurzburg (Germany) presented at the Late Breaker Session on “Financing and Capacity Building in HIV Programming” a paper on “Methodology to assess volumes and patterns of official development assistance (ODA) for health and HIV services: the reality of European governments’ financial contributions for the HIV response in developing countries in the period of 2007-2009”.
The paper is based on the work carried on by the AfGH network on tracking European ODA contribution for health and HIV services. The analysis shows that the calculation of ODA flows for health and HIV services based solely on official data may be misleading due to inconsistent and erroneous reporting. In several cases, the real contributions determined through our critical and detailed investigation differ considerably from estimates relying simply on donor indications.
The research also reveals that despite wide variations regarding the financial efforts, only four out of the 17 countries (Luxemburg, Norway, Sweden and Ireland) reached in 2009 the target level of 0.1% ODA for health of GNI recommended by the Commission on Macroeconomics and Health. The main part of the European gap results from the fact that most of the larger economies (Germany, France, Italy, Spain) fall far short of the targets. Regarding ODA for the HIV response, we observe abysmal differences regarding financial efforts: whereas only few countries contributed their fair share others paid less than a tenth of what they should pay and again, the backlog of the majority of larger economies (Germany, France, Spain and especially Italy) is responsible for the main part of the gap.
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