Due to high routine vaccination coverage, overall counts of diphtheria case have significantly declined in the Western Pacific Region recently. However, diphtheria is still prevalent in several countries and areas of the Region and remains a public health issue due to its high case fatality rate.
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This Field Guide for Preparedness and Response to Diphtheria Outbreaks in the Western Pacific Region is a reference resource for Member States to develop national guidelines adapted to their local context. Countries may also use this Guide to facilitate outbreak preparedness and public health responses to reduce morbidity and mortality due to diphtheria.
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The Contingency Fund for Emergencies (CFE) provides WHO with rapid and flexible resources to respond to disease outbreaks and other health emergencies. The annual report provides an overview of the use and impact of the Fund over the previous year.
The Regional Action Framework for Noncommunicable Disease Prevention and Control provides a unified vision of objectives and recommended actions to combat the noncommunicable disease (NCD) epidemic in the Western Pacific Region. Implementation should be supported by cross-sectoral coordination..., sustainable financing, evidence-based policy, and community engagement, tailored to each Member State’s unique context. In doing so, Member States are encouraged to transform a disease treatment-centered “sick system” into a “health system” in which a population’s health and well-being enable socioeconomic development.
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The Quadripartite organizations have developed the One Health Priority Research Agenda for AMR report, this is a joint initiative to assist in directing and catalysing scientific interest and financial investments for the priority research agenda across sectors for countries and funding bodies. The ...research agenda also serves as a guide to mitigate One Health AMR that will help policymakers, researchers, and a multidisciplinary scientific community work together on solutions to prevent and mitigate AMR within the One Health approach.
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This report aims to outline the current available knowledge on the health and wellbeing of older persons in the Region of the Americas during the United Nations Decade of Healthy Ageing (2021-2030). It also seeks to guide political actions towards ensuring the human rights of older persons, and desc...ribes the negotiation and drafting process behind the Inter-American Convention on Protecting the Human Rights of Older Persons. It reports on the doctrinal and legal developments that led the Region of the Americas to draft the Convention and describes its action areas and guaranteed rights, as well as the obligations assumed by the States Parties. The Convention is an essential tool to advance the strategies of the Decade of Healthy Ageing. This publication reflects on the importance of having a major legal instrument for this purpose at the international level. The demographic transition in Latin America and the Caribbean will continue to shape the ability of countries and health systems to respond to the needs of the population. Given this reality, international instruments will be needed to guarantee the full enjoyment of the human rights of older persons. In order to design inclusive and sustainable systems, accurate, updated, and effective information is required. The Decade of Healthy Ageing––the initiative that constitutes the framework for this document––is a strategic period in which to focus on data generation and monitoring.
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The identification of Priority Areas for Multisectoral Interventions (PAMIs, sometimes referred to as ‘hotspots’) for cholera control is among the first steps for a cholera-affected country to develop or revise a National Cholera Plan (NCP) for cholera control. PAMI identification is critical to... maximize the potential impact of NCP implementation on cholera control.
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The greatest risk to persons engaging in international medical emergency response is poor preparation.
The In Control handbook hopes to provide a remedy.
At the time of writing, we are living through the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, a health emergency that disregards physical borders, brin...gs into focus social inequalities and affects people on every continent. This shared challenge requires unprecedented measures and the collaboration of the brightest minds to support global health protection through this crisis and beyond. Healthcare infrastructures have to be strengthened, public health capacities and processes upgraded, medical countermeasures and vaccinations found and psychosocial side-effects treated.
Solidarity is the normative order of the day and the human species has to collaborate to face this invisible threat. Hiding and living in fear is not an option in this interconnected world. We have both a responsibility and an opportunity to make substantial contributions to a safer, healthier and more sustainable future for us all.
The existence of this handbook is an impressive example of solidarity. Over 50 authors from more than 15 institutes and organisations have come together voluntarily within a very short time to make their expertise available and enable cross-sectoral thinking. Knowledge is bundled, resources are combined, information gaps are filled. The In Control handbook is not a theoretical treatise of possible dangers, but a collection of subject-matter expertise, written by experts and practitioners who have shaped health topics over the past 20 years in the most diverse corners of the world.
The Centre for International Health Protection at the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) is collaborating with its partners and investing heavily in the build-up of operational know-how and capacity to support health crisis response abroad. This is done by preparing and enabling professionals to deploy safely across the world to assist those in need. In Control addresses the multi-faceted challenges of an international deployment. Readers will find not only technical medical information, but also insights into, for example, the fragility of our environment, the cultural differences that influence risk communication or the dilemmas arising from social distancing. Legal principles are highlighted, along with ethical guidance to ensure that our actions and decisions correspond to the highest moral standards.
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The 2021 Financing for Sustainable Development Report responds to the request made by Member States to review the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on nancing for sustainable development, and to propose recommendations to rebuild better. The report underlines the need for policy actions to ensure e e...ctive support until the recovery is rmly underway. Its thematic chapter discusses the systemic and interlinked nature of risk in a tightly intertwined world, and the importance of providing nancing for risk reduction and resilience and nancing that is risk-informed and resilient. With the collaboration of more than 60 agencies of the United Nations system and partner international organizations, the report provides much needed guidance to Member States to take action towards a more resilient future.
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Global growth is projected to slow significantly amid high inflation, tight monetary policy, and more restrictive credit conditions. The possibility of more widespread bank turmoil and tighter monetary policy could result in even weaker global growth and lead to financial dislocations in the most vu...lnerable emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs). Comprehensive policy action is needed to foster macroeconomic and financial stability. Among many EMDEs, and especially in low-income countries, bolstering fiscal sustainability will require generating higher revenues, making spending more efficient, and improving debt management practices. Continued international cooperation is also necessary to tackle climate change, support populations affected by crises and hunger, and provide debt relief where needed.
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This report analyses the intersection of HIV, COVID-19 and public debt in developing countries. The collision between COVID-19 and a crippling debt crisis have reversed decades of progress - putting present and future investments in health and HIV at risk. Pragmatic options to address the pandemic t...riad are proposed.
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UNAIDS leads and inspires the world to achieve its shared vision of zero new HIV infections, zero discrimination and zero AIDS-related deaths. It unites the efforts of 11 UN Cosponsor organizations- UNHCR, UNICEF, WFP, UNDP,UNFPA, UNODC, UN Women, ILO, UNESCO, WHO and the World Bank- and a Secretari...at.
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Six months after its launch on 24 April, the Access to COVID-19 Tools (ACT) Accelerator has already delivered concrete results in speeding up the development of new therapeutics, diagnostics, and vaccines. Now mid-way through the scale-up phase, the tools we need to fundamentally change the course o...f this pandemic are within reach. But to deliver the full impact of the ACT-Accelerator – and ultimately an exit to this global crisis – these tools need to be available everywhere. On behalf of the ACT-Accelerator Pillar lead agencies – CEPI, Gavi, the Global Fund, FIND, Unitaid, Wellcome Trust, the World Bank, and the World Health Organization, as well as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation – I am pleased to share this document setting out the near-term priorities, deliverables and financing requirements of the ACT-Accelerator Pillars and Health Systems Connector. Urgent action to address these financing requirements will boost the impact of the ACTAccelerator achievements to date, fast-track the development and deployment of additional game-changing tools, and mitigate the risk of a widening gap in access to COVID-19 tools between low- and high-income countries. Delivering on this promise requires strong political leadership, financial investment, and incountry capacity building. COVID-19 cannot be beaten by any one country acting alone. We must ACT now, and ACT together to end the COVID-19 crisis.
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This paper introduces a new dataset of official financing—including foreign aid and other forms of concessional and non-concessional state financing—from China to 138 countries between 2000 and 2014. We use these data to investigate whether and to what extent Chinese aid affects economic growth ...in recipient countries. To account for the endogeneity of aid, we employ an instrumental-variables strategy that relies on exogenous variation in the supply of Chinese aid over time resulting from changes in Chinese steel production. Variation across recipient countries results from a country’s probability of receiving aid. Controlling for year- and recipient-fixed effects that capture the levels of these variables, their interaction provides a powerful and excludable instrument. Our results show that Chinese official development assistance (ODA) boosts economic growth in recipient countries. For the average recipient country, we estimate that one additional Chinese ODA project produces a 0.7 percentage point increase in economic growth two years after the project is committed. We also benchmark the effectiveness of Chinese aid vis-á-vis the World Bank, the United States, and all members of the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee (DAC).
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AidData has developed a set of open source data collection methods to track project-level data on suppliers of official finance who do not participate in global reporting systems. This codebook outlines the version 1.1 set of TUFF procedures that have been developed, tested, refined, and implemented... by AidData researchers and affiliated faculty at the College of William & Mary and Brigham Young University.
In the first iteration of this codebook, AidData's Media-Based Data Collection Methodology, Version 1.0, we referred to our data collection procedures as a “media-based data collection” (MBDC) methodology. The term “media-based” was misleading, as the methodology does not rely exclusively on media reports; rather, media reports are used only as a departure point, and are supplemented with case studies undertaken by scholars and non-governmental organizations, project inventories supplied through Chinese embassy websites, and grants and loan data published by recipient governments. In the interest of providing greater clarity, we now refer to our methodology for systematically gathering open source development finance information as the Tracking Underreported Financial Flows (TUFF) methodology. This codebook outlines the set of TUFF procedures that have been developed, tested, refined, and implemented by AidData staff and affiliated faculty at the College of William & Mary and Brigham Young University.
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Unfortunately, current data available on SDG financing are not sufficient to quantify the distribution of financing for the SDGs.
AidData’s methodology for measuring financing to the SDGs attempts to fill this gap by analyzing development project documentation to estimate project-level contributi...ons to the SDGs (and their associated targets). This methodology lets us see where development financing is targeted, allowing comparisons among SDG goals and individual SDG targets.
This methodology note describes two iterations of AidData’s methodology. The first, based on a crosswalk with existing aid reporting schemes, was employed for AidData’s 2017 flagship report Realizing Agenda 2030: Will donor dollars and country priorities align with global goals? and our brief Financing the SDGs in Colombia. The second iteration of the methodology employs a direct coding scheme, linking development projects directly to the SDGs through analysis and coding of project descriptions rather than through an intermediary classification system. This method was employed for our 2019 brief Financing the SDGs: Evidence in Four Countries.
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This report seeks to uncover the extent to which global goals crowd in international financing, inform domestic policy priorities, and navigate progress toward development outcomes in low- and middle-income countries (LICs and MICs). Our report:
Provides a historical perspective on how ODA financin...g was aligned with the MDGs, and the perceived influence of global goals in shaping domestic priorities
Offers a baseline of ODA financing to the SDGs and a forward-looking perspective in translating past lessons learned from the MDGs era into actionable insights
Using a pilot methodology developed by AidData, we analyze ODA flows during the MDGs era (2000-2013) and approximate baseline financing for each goal prior to the adoption of Agenda 2030 in September 2015. The dataset used in the report, Financing to the SDGs, Version 1.0, provides project-level data on estimated Official Development Assistance (ODA) commitments to the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) from 2000 to 2013. In this report, we also draw upon the responses of nearly 7,000 public, private, and civil society leaders from AidData’s novel 2014 Reform Efforts Survey to assess how national-level policymakers perceive the MDGs in light of their domestic reform priorities, and what this may mean for the SDGs.
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The GFF needs an additional US$2.5 billion from 2021 to 2025 to enable countries to protect health gains and accelerate progress toward the 2030 Goals. Of this amount, the GFF urgently needs to secure new pledges of US$1.2 billion by the end of 2021 to help its current 36 partner countries protect ...and maintain essential health services and implement time-sensitive service delivery and health system improvements to enable a sharp bend of the curve back to a positive trajectory to close the gap to the SDGs.
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Strengthening resource tracking and monitorig health expanditure
To assess the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on health and HIV expenditure, UNAIDS carried out a modelling study on fiscal space for health and HIV. From a sample of 28 countries, three countries—the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Jamaica, and Lesotho—were selected to capture health and HIV ...expenditure impacts across countries with especially marked differences in burdens of disease (including HIV prevalence), HIV donor dependency, level of economic development, and geographic location. While the three-country sample is too small to permit findings to be generalized to other countries, these analyses are useful for informing UNAIDS’ work to identify some policy positions to minimize the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on the HIV response.
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Financing Global Health 2015 is the seventh edition of IHME’s annual series on global health financing. This report captures trends in development assistance for health (DAH) and government health expenditure as source (GHE-S) in low- and middle-income countries. Annually updated GHE-S and DAH est...imates are produced to aid decision-makers and other global health stakeholders in identifying funding gaps and invesment opportunities vital to improving population health. This year, IHME made a number of improvements to the data collection and methods implemented to generate Financing Global Health estimates.
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