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Developing a New Health Strategy for the World Bank
November 3, 2006
While the Global Fund and WHO elections have received far more attention recently, the global health community would be remiss to underestimate the significance of the World Bank’s own leadership search for a new Senior Vice President for Human Development. CGD’s Ruth Levine draws attention to this issue in a new Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine article (.pdf) with Kent Buse that addresses the Bank’s current global health strategy, identifies its key comparative advantages, and describes the steps the new SVP must take to work effectively “across sectors, across countries, and within systems.”
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November 7th, 2006 at 12:25 pm
The Levine and Buse paper does a very good job of setting out both the Bank’s strengths and the difficulties it has in applying them. One worrisome phrase is “deliberately inward-looking background note:” after 12 years working for the Bank and considerable consultancy experience with it afterward, I’m convinced that the Bank is much too inward-looking. Particularly in health, this often takes the form of trying too hard to satisfy the orthodox free-market-minded among the staff economists who still think health is just about like any other sector of the economy. They will grudgingly yield to arguments about public goods and externalities, but concentrating on those arguments means that the Bank health staff tie themselves in knots trying to justify projects on non-communicable disease, where the arguments hardly apply. The arguments that health is crucial to development, and that avoiding financial ruin is a worthy objective, are slowly making headway, but the Bank is still, as the paper says, trying to find its footing (and sometimes falling on its face, as in the recent uproar over its record with malaria). One hopes for a strategy to emerge from the current thinking that is more than, “when out of ammunition, keep shooting so the enemy won’t find out.”