Project Overview
Summary
The COVID-19 pandemic has firmly established the urgency of pandemic preparedness for assuring the world’s health and economic security. Developing plans for improving pandemic preparedness is necessary but not sufficient to yield actual improvements in pandemic preparedness; countries and donors also need to “put money where their mouth is” to realize those plans.
ThinkWell is supporting the World Bank to develop an approach that developing countries can use to track financing for strengthening capacities to prevent, detect, and respond to public health emergencies.
Challenges
There is little systematic, coordinated, and routine measurement of how much countries, regional actors, and donors are spending in practice on building pandemic preparedness.
Approach
ThinkWell is producing a guidance document for measuring country expenditure for pandemic preparedness, in collaboration with the World Bank and with inputs from global agencies working on health expenditure tracking. We will also propose an implementation plan to apply the approach in 2-3 countries.
Breaking New Ground
This project presents an opportunity to bring together global agencies working on health expenditure tracking to develop a common approach for measuring country expenditure for pandemic preparedness. This is critical to track progress against commitments and plans. Knowing the source of funding and spending by types of activity is also important for ensuring transparency and accountability of spending as well as generating evidence about the most effective investment areas.