Prompting donors to increase funding for HIV/AIDS in Rwanda
Estimation Year
1998
Actual Policy Use
HIV/AIDS affects 11.2 percent of the adult population of Rwanda. Given the severe impact of the disease on its population, the government of Rwanda felt that an understanding of the sources of financing for HIV/AIDS services and the distribution of these funds could be instrumental to designing effective and financially sound interventions for dealing with the pandemic. So when Rwanda began its NHA activity in 1999, it extended the framework to also include a sub analysis specifically dealing with HIV/AIDS related expenditures.
The NHA sub analysis revealed that only 10 percent of all health funds were used to target the prevention and treatment of the disease. Moreover, while donors financed over half of health expenditures, NHA exposed that only 1 percent of their funds actually went towards financing HIV/AIDS services. Closer examination of HIV/AIDS funds showed that households were actually the primary financiers of HIV/AIDS services, accounting for approximately 93.5 percent of such funds; donors filled in the remaining gap of 6 percent and the government accounted for less than 1 percent of total HIV/AIDS funding. Quantification of the financial burden of the disease on households and the paucity of donor funds to address the epidemic contributed to the donor community’s decision to increase its HIV/AIDS-specific contributions from US $0.5 million in 1998 to more than $1.6 million in 2000. In addition to donors using the finding for their policy purposes, NHA enabled the Rwandan Ministry of Health to design and implement targeted policy interventions aimed at improving the financing of prevention activities and increasing access to basic health care services for people living with HIV/AIDS.
Source
Barnett, C., M. Bhawalkar, AK Nandakumar, and P. Schneider. February 2001. The Application of National Health Accounts Framework to HIV/AIDS in Rwanda. Special Initiatives Report No. 31. Bethesda, MD: Partnerships for Health Reform Project, Abt Associates
