Development Aid: Health Services
(asked on 10th January 2023) - View Source
Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, how much his Department spent on international development targeted primarily at (a) the delivery of and (b) research into healthcare services in the last five years.
Answered by
Andrew Mitchell
Minister of State (Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office) (Minister for Development)
From 2017 - 2021, the FCDO spent more than £4.5 billion on activities that primarily support the delivery of health services, and more than £730 million on global health research.
Between 2016 and 2021, FCDO supported Gavi to vaccinate 324 million children, averting 6.9 million deaths. Between 2015 and 2020, FCDO reached an average of 25.3 million total women and girls with modern methods of family planning per year, and reached 55.1 million young children, women and adolescent girls through our nutrition programmes. In Nepal, sustained UK support has helped to increase the proportion of women giving birth in health facilities from 9% in 2001 to 80% in 2022.
FCDO's investment in health research has supported the development of 11 new drugs for malaria, including a child friendly malaria treatment that is used in more than 50 countries, more than 20 diagnostics for faster and more reliable detection of tuberculosis, malaria, sleeping sickness and COVID-19, and a new vaccine for rotavirus.
The spend figure provided for activities that primarily support, directly or indirectly, the delivery of health services includes all activities under the OECD-DAC Creditor Reporting System sector codes for 'Health, General', 'Basic Health', 'Non-Communicable Diseases (NCDs)' and 'Population Policies/Programmes & Reproductive Health', excluding 'Medical research' (12182) and 'Research for prevention and control of NCDs' (12382). Further information can be found in the Statistics on International Development: final UK aid spend 2021 (https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/statistics-on-international-development-final-uk-aid-spend-2021).
Year | Activities that support delivery of health services |
2017 | £1,018,870,299 |
2018 | £936,597,525 |
2019 | £958,566,780 |
2020 | £1,041,225,156 |
2021 | £559,469,940 |
Total | £4,514,729,701 |
The total spend on global health research by the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office's central Research and Evidence Directorate over the last five financial years is as follows:
Financial year | Total spend on global health research |
2018/19 | £132,330,000 |
2019/20 | £155,410,000 |
2020/21 | £371,860,000 |
2021/22 | £75,330,000 |
2022/23 | Final and audited spend for 2022/23 will be published in our annual report at the end of the financial year |
Total | £734,930,000 |