NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Wednesday, July 1, 2015

Hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent since 2000 to tackle some of the world’s biggest health problems.

The bulk of global health financing was spent on efforts to curb the spread of HIV and make treatment for the virus accessible to everyone who needs it. From $1.4 billion at the start of the Millennium Development Goals, spending on HIV and AIDS shot up to more than $10 billion annually from 2010 to the present, peaking at $11.14 billion in 2013, according to the latest global health financing data released by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation.

Reducing under-5 mortality came in second. While nowhere near the levels spent on HIV and AIDS, funding to decrease child deaths has grown 8.3 percent annually since 2000. Spending to improve maternal health also grew, though pales in comparison at just $3 billion in 2014.

The increases in spending for these three health problems are largely due to the MDGs, which brought the world’s attention to these global challenges — and the reason why advocates of neglected health issues are pushing for these concerns to be included in the post-2015 agenda.

But as the MDGs come to a close, will funding for these three also wind down?

Wider set of health goals

The recently released post-2015 zero draft points to a wider health objective: universal health coverage. And while AIDS, under-5 mortality and maternal health continue to figure under the proposed Goal 3, they now share the space with other health issues, some of which have been gaining attention in recent years.