Development Assistance for Health and the Middle East and North Africa
[Thesis]
Zhao, Yingxi
Dieleman, Joseph
University of Washington
2019
22 p.
M.P.H.
University of Washington
2019
Introduction Donor countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) including Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and United Arab Emirates have been among the most generous donors in the world, providing a large amount of aid relative to their national income. However, little is known about how much these country donors are contributing for health. In this study, I worked with my study team and aimed to address the gap by estimating the amount of development assistance for health (DAH) contributed by MENA country donors from 2000 to 2017, disaggregating by health focus area and recipient. Methods We tracked DAH provided and received by the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region from 2000-2017, leveraging publicly available development assistance data in the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) database of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), project-level and aggregate-level government agency budgets, reports, as well as financial statements from key international development agencies. We generated estimates of DAH provided by the three largest donor countries in the MENA region (United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia) and compared contributions to their relative gross domestic product and government spending; We also captured DAH contribution contributed by other MENA country governments (including but not limited to Egypt, Iran, Oman, Qatar, Turkey) disbursed through multilateral agencies. Additionally, we compared DAH contributed from the MENA region and provided to the MENA region. Results In 2017, DAH contributed by the MENA region reached