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The Muskoka Initiative and Global Health Financing

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The Muskoka Initiative and Global Health Financing May 2014 By Aniket Bhushan Winter 2012 The Muskoka Initiative andByBy Jennifer Vanessa Erin Ushie Slahub Global Health Financing In 2010, Canada led donor countries in launching the G-8 Muskoka Initiative for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health (MNCH). The $2.85 This policy brief offers a billion 5 year commitment (2010-2015) was undertaken at the highest preliminary data level with the strong support of the Prime Minister. analysis of Canada's Muskoka MNCH health The funding commitment entails $1.1 billion in new and additional financing initiative, spending, over and above $1.75 billion in continued baseline funding. placing the same in the wider context of global The key finding from our analysis, based on data from the start of the health financing. The analysis sheds light on commitment to 2013, is that Canada is well on track to meet its financial the following questions: commitment. This is salutary, especially given the impact of fiscal austerity on the aid budget and other significant changes such as the Where is Canada with respect to its financing amalgamation of the former aid agency with the department of foreign commitment? affairs during this period. These changes have not deterred Canada’s commitment to global health. Canada emerges as a leader in global Where does Muskoka- MNCH funding go? And health financing and health is the most important sector in Canadian aid. who are the key Replicating official claims regarding the status of the initiative, however, partners? proved relatively difficult. While a lot of useful information has been made Which subsectors, available, this tends to be fragmented (across sources, data and format within health, are the types). This presents an opportunity to further enhance data focus of the initiative? transparency, access to information and ultimately accountability to both How does Canada taxpayers and our development partners. compare with other donors active in global Most analyses of health financing to date have focused either exclusively health financing? on Canada, or more generally on global health financing. Placing Canada How does donor health in a global perspective is a gap this report seeks to respond to. This spending compare with report aims to provide a more complete picture of the MNCH initiative by other sources, such as leveraging open data from a range of sources. The report also explores domestic financing in health financing from a developing country perspective, taking Canada’s developing countries? 10 priority Muskoka-MNCH countries as a sample. A limitation of this analysis is that it focuses primarily on financial data analysis, as opposed to a wider analysis of health outcomes and program results. About Muskoka- MNCH The Muskoka-MNCH initiative came about as a result of a concerted effort by global health experts and health advocates during the mid-2000s to raise awareness of key maternal and child health concerns across the developing world. Canada, which hosted the 2010 G-8 summit, took a leadership role in both committing financing and galvanizing other donors around maternal and child health. G-8 countries committed to mobilizing $5 billion of additional funding over the five years starting in 2010 towards MNCH, in addition to $4.1 billion that G-8 members already contributed annually. In total the Initiative was anticipated to mobilize significantly more than the $10 billion over the period 2010-2015. With commitments by other governments (Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Republic of Korea and Switzerland), and by foundations (the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and UN Foundation), the total amount (including Canada’s $2.85 billion) committed at Muksoka reached US$7.3 billion (Integrated Implementation Framework). Access to information and accountability, have been top priorities for the global MNCH agenda since Muskoka. The Commission on Information and Accountability for Women's and Children's Health (COIA) was set up in December 2010, soon after the Muskoka summit. Here again Canada has played a leadership role. Prime Minister Stephen Harper co-chaired the Commission along with President Kikwete of Tanzania. The Commission played a key role in setting an ambitious but realistic accountability framework. Its recommendations covered three main areas: investing in the generation of better information for better results (ranging from investment in health information systems, to tracking 11 common indicators at a disaggregated level for monitoring). Better tracking of financial resources going towards MNCH (ranging from aggregate resource indicators on total health expenditure to compacts between governments and development partners to increased capacity to review health spending and relate the same to human rights, gender and other equity goals). Better oversight of results and resources (at the national level, through increased information sharing on commitments, improvements to the OECD-DAC Creditor Reporting System and establishment of an independent expert review group at the global level) (WHO 2010). Our analysis and approach This analysis focuses primarily on financial tracking, as opposed to a wider analysis of health outcomes and indicators. In many ways it reflects the level of progress made in the areas noted above, but also reflects some of the limitations and opportunities. A fuller analysis would take into account health outcomes and results data, and would go well beyond an operational or programming perspective. It would need to account for a host of factors that make attribution of results to particular expenditures very challenging, especially over a relatively short period of time as far as (mostly) slow moving health indicators are concerned. NSI’s analysis was motivated by the fact Muskoka-MNCH is the largest individual element in Canadian aid spending. While we found a lot of very useful “open data” was available that helped shed light on the projects and activities within the initiative, this was often fragmented across sources, data types (CSV, XML, HTML tables etc.) and formats (see Figure 1). NSI’s work on leveraging open data to enhance development effectiveness is aimed in part at building tools and solutions that help make open data less technical and more accessible. One of the ways NSI does this is through interactive data visualizations on the Canadian International Development Platform (CIDP). The analysis here will also be available through the platform (www.cidpnsi.ca), via interactive visualizations and as raw data (in machine readable formats). Figure 1: Databases and Sources Muskoka-MNCH Tracker Data Main Source Specific Database or Datasets Department of Foreign Affairs Trade and Development MNCH Project Browser (Canada) (DFATD), via the departmental Open Data Projects Browser Portal Historical Projects Data Set International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) standard Statistical Report on International Assistance List of Muskoka-MNCH Unique Project IDs Direct data from DFATD Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation Financing Global Health 2013 (U Washington) Organization for Economic Cooperation and Creditor Reporting System (CRS) Development - Development Assistance Committee (OECD-DAC) World Bank World Development Indicators Database Health Stats Database World Health Organization (WHO) Global Health Expenditures Database (GHED) Global Health Expenditures Atlas 2011 See references section for further details. Another motivation behind this analysis is simplifying the relatively complicated nature of the Muskoka-MNCH financial commitment. The Canadian contribution is broken down into $1.1 billion in new funding, in addition to $1.75 billion in continued baseline funding. Baseline funding is tracked through the OECD-DAC CRS database according to a predetermined formula agreed by the G-8 donor countries (G8 2010). When we began our analysis there was no publically available source that linked this legacy data with the new and additional $1.1 billion (which was shared to a large extent but not completely through the DFATD MNCH Project Browser). Furthermore, expectations around transparency, accountability and data access have increased since the start of the initiative due to substantial progress made by Canada (or more particularly former CIDA) by: (a) publishing more project level data through the open data portal (2011), (b) committing and publishing to the IATI standard (since 2012), and (c) raising Canada’s global profile as a transparent aid donor as indicated by the 2013 Aid Transparency Index (Bhushan and Bond 2013). The technical work in terms of joining and combining databases and datasets, conducting analytics and building visual interfaces was done through a series of coding events (also called ‘hackathons’ or data dives). Proofs of concept and preliminary findings were discussed at the Random Hacks of Kindness (Ottawa) data dive in December 2013 and at the Open Data Development Challenge (Montreal) in January 2014 (Bhushan 2013, 2014, 2014a; ODDC 2014). The main databases and sources used are specified in Figure 1 (further details are available on request). Canadian sources were accessed through the DFATD open data portal between December 2013 and April 2014 (with the exception of project identifiers and legacy financial data sought directly from the department).1 OECD-DAC data was used to situate Canada amongst other DAC donors. The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation and World Health Organization health expenditure data sources, are used to situate Canadian and other donor
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