The World Bank gets introspective

Bill and Melinda Gates have been pouring billions into programmes designed to help the health of residents in poor nations. To determine the return various projects generate, Gates helped finance a World Bank investigation into the efficiency of measures to improve the health of the world's poor.

The World Bank studied the results of programmes meant to help the poor and found that even programmes designed to reach poor people often end up instead helping the better-off.

According to the researchers:

In almost all of the more than 20 countries surveyed, the richest 20 per cent of the population received more, or as much of, the government's subsidised maternal and child health care services as the poorest 20 per cent.

Studies of Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana, Guinea, Kenya, Madagascar, South Africa and Tanzania all have shown that government spending on health favours upper-income groups.

The World Bank remains optimistic that such programmes for the poor can be made to work. On the other hand, the World Bank was founded almost six decades ago and only now is releasing reports showing that some of the most promoted programmes for the poor in the history of the world are more likely to benefit the rich, says author James Peron.

Source: James Peron, The World Bank Gets Introspective, TSC Daily, January 9, 2006; and Reaching the Poor with Health, Nutrition and Population Services: What Works, What Doesn't, and Why, edited by Davidson R. Gwatkin, Adam Wagstaff and Abdo S. Yazbeck, World Bank, December 2005.

For text: http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=010606I

For World Bank study: http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTPAH/Resources/Reaching-the-Poor/complete.pdf

For more on International: http://www.ncpa.org/pi/internat/intdex1.html

FMF Policy Bulletin/ 21 February 2006