Health is one of the largest and most complex aid sectors: 16 percent of all aid went to the health sector in 2009. While many stress the importance of aid effectiveness, there are limited quantitative analyses of the quality of health aid, and various studies point out to the failure of health aid to increase health outcomes.
In this study, Denizhan Duran and Amanda Glassman apply Nancy Birdsall and Homi Kharas’s Quality of Official Development Assistance (QuODA) methodology to rank 30 donors across 23 indicators of aid effectiveness in health. Their indicators rely on the premise that health aid effectiveness would increase through increased donor efficiency, reduced burden on recipients, support to local institutions, and transparent reporting practices.