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- Author:
-
Hao Huang
(UNDP Phillipines)
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- Format:
- Poster
- Theme:
- Health inequalities, disability and aging
Short Abstract:
South Asian countries face significant gaps in global health financing. This article formed a framework to analyze the structural determinants of such gaps in South Asia: socioeconomic changes drive up the health financing gaps, weak social governance capacity and resource inefficiency, and neoliberal geopolitics manipulate agenda setting in South Asia. Recommendations are also provided.
Long Abstract:
Global health financing is tasked to improve health equity and achieve sustainable development goal 3 (SDG3) worldwide, which involves the mobilization of funding from both domestic and external sources. In South Asia, external donors have played a significant role in disease prevention, control, and treatment to compensate for the lack of local resources. However, the international community pays limited attention to South Asian countries’ vulnerable status in securing health financing, especially in the face of COVID-19 and the war crisis in Ukraine. This article stressed the scarcity of funding, especially for non-communicable diseases (NCDs), and widespread impoverishment due to out-of-pocket (OOP) payments across South Asia. We analyze structural determinants from the perspectives of socio-economic changes, governance capacity, and geopolitical concerns. Our findings highlight that, in South Asia, the overall economic disadvantage in the global market increases the disease burden and limits the fiscal capacity for public services, weak public health systems and lack of regional cooperation drive up costs for disease control, and neoliberal geopolitics exertion of influence worldwide has brought further uncertainty and risks to local communities. We suggest prioritizing primary health care for all (PHC), scaling up public investment for priority diseases, establishing stronger leadership in the regional agenda, and overall reform of the global financing system are important initiatives that should be pursued to make health financing sustainable in South Asia.
Keywords: South Asia, development assistance for health, global health financing