Health funding gap analysis for African countries

[TheebikaS]

Objective

• Update the $66bn reported health financing gap p.a. for African Continent, widely used by partners and stakeholders.

Methodology

• This figure is based on 2015 data, reported in the 2019 'Health and Economic Growth in Africa' UNECA report.
• Gap calculation based on premise that gross government health expenditure should be at least 5% of GDP.
• Note that when talking about health financing gap, what this figure actually reflects is the gap to achieving at least 90 per cent of population having adequate health coverage (UHC).

Why we want to update

• Understand whether this gap has widened or not
• If widely used by partners and key stakeholders, good to update with the latest data possible

Limitations

• 5% of GDP measure is criticized as not feasible (too ambitious), and as considering economic factors (GDP) only, as opposed to social determinants of health.
• Still some value in this analysis, to show how much it's changed since the $66bn, and with the caveats clearly spelled out.

Our next steps

• Check raw data for Health financing topic page, to see whether we have complete data for all African countries, or what methodology was used where we had incomplete/missing data.
• Use World Economic Outlook data for GDP.
• See where our methodology deviates from that of the '2019 Health and Economic Growth in Africa' report
• Latest year with data seems to be 2020, so use 2020 constant prices.

Check in with Nupur this Thursday, where these next steps and her work on this will be discussed. @jm-rivera feel free to add anything else that I missed.

Thank you!

[jm-rivera]

Thanks @TheebikaS. Based on our discussion yesterday:

• I can confirm we don't do any forward fills at an individual country level. However, when producing totals, like an Africa total, we try to have as consistent a grouping as possible - so we do forward fills if there are gaps between years (with a max of 2 missing values between to present values).
• I have pulled the data below. It's in constant 2020 prices, using the same underlying data as we are using for the topic page. It has Africa totals following the same methodology/principles as the topic page.

https://github.com/ONEcampaign/topic_health_financing/blob/43-health-funding-gap-analysis-for-african-countries/output/africa_health_spending_gdp_usd.csv

I hope this helps and let me know if you need anything else

[TheebikaS]

Thanks very much @jm-rivera - will review and let you know.

[TheebikaS]

Notes from comparing UNECA 2015 data used in report and data used on our health financing topic page:

• Both data files missing data for Somalia and Libya (no data available)
• Our health financing data also misses data for Liberia and Zimbabwe - to check with Nupur or Jorge

Note: for comparisons, deflate 2015 prices to 2020 constant prices.

[jm-rivera]

Aha! yes @TheebikaS, we currently remove both because of some wild data. #23 was meant to check for that but the timelines got so compressed we didn't. I will do my best to get to it early next week. @nupur-parikh FYI

[TheebikaS]

Ok, great thank you. I'll discuss with Nupur today.

[TheebikaS]

@jm-rivera, Nupur and I discussed #23. Fine for this to take longer, especially if you are juggling multiple priorities. For the time being, we can work with what we have, as we figure out how we want to use this number (given some of the limitations mentioned above).

[nupur-parikh]

Thanks Theebika creating the issue and looping me in, @jm-rivera thank you for pulling all this data together for us so quickly and in one place, this is a great place for us to start evaluating how/if we should use these figures!

[nupur-parikh]

Note: for comparisons, deflate 2015 prices to 2020 constant prices.

@jm-rivera any chance you can guide me in where/how I can find this in current prices so I can convert to 2015 constant prices (if this exists). I looked through a few of the scripts you have uploaded for this project and I couldn't tell which one would lead me in the right direction. I'm trying to teach myself how to do this, so I could be completely off track with how I'm approaching this, so your thoughts are always welcome. Thank you in advance!!!