ArticleBMJ global health2023
Flexibly funding WHO? An analysis of its donors' voluntary contributions.
Article in BMJ global health, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed.
- Sustainable surgical financing through philanthropy: an analysis of contributions to low- and middle-income countries (LMICs).BMJ global health · 2026Review
- Health equity and the global social contract: beyond incrementalism and illusionary solidarity.International journal for equity in health · 2026Review
- Who's leading WHO? A quantitative analysis of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's grants to WHO, 2000-2024.BMJ global health · 2025Article
- The United States withdrawal from the world health organization (WHO), its implications for global health governance.Globalization and health · 2025Article
- The Political Economy of the World Health Organization Model Lists of Essential Medicines.The Milbank quarterly · 2025Article
- Developing an agenda for the decolonization of global health.Bulletin of the World Health Organization · 2024Article
- Global Health on the Brink: The United States Withdrawal from WHO, Paris Climate Accord, and the 90-Day Freeze on Foreign Assistance: Implications and Strategies for Action.The East African health research journal · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
introductionSince the 1970s, voluntary contributions have become an increasingly important component of WHO's budget. As voluntary contributions tend to be earmarked for donor-specified programmes and projects, there are concerns that this trend has diverted focus away from WHO's strategic priorities, made coordination and attaining coherence more difficult, undermined WHO's democratic structures and given undue power to a handful of wealthy donors. In the past few years, the WHO Secretariat has pushed for donors to increase the amount of flexible funding they provide.
methodsThis paper aims to add to the literature on WHO financing by constructing and analysing a dataset based on figures extracted from WHO documents for the period 2010-21. It aims to answer two questions: who funds WHO and how flexible is that funding?
resultsOur analysis demonstrates that in the last decade voluntary contributions have steadily increased as a proportion of WHO's budget, from 75% at the start of the period to 88% at the end. High-income countries and donors based in high-income countries provided 90% of voluntary contributions in 2020. Surprisingly, the share of voluntary contributions provided by upper middle-income countries was consistently less than the share by lower middle-income countries. Furthermore, in terms of their share of voluntary contributions, we found that upper middle-income countries contributed the least proportion of their gross national income to WHO.
conclusionWe conclude that WHO remains constrained by the conditions attached to the vast majority of funding that it receives from its donors. Further work on how to flexibly fund WHO is required. We recommend that the Agile Member States Task Group on Strengthening WHO's Budgetary, Programmatic and Financing Governance continues the work of the Working Group on Sustainable Financing by focusing on the incentives that determine donor support for specified and flexible voluntary contributions.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.