How WHO wants to finance the new global health goal

World Health Organisation 10 July 2015, Addis Ababa/Geneva - To pay for the new Sustainable Development Goal for health, WHO is urging countries to move towards universal health coverage and to scale up international investment in catalytic development funding. WHO urges the international community to strengthen cooperation with low- and lower-middle income countries to combine domestic and external funding so they provide the resources required.

As an important step WHO recommends that countries reducing the need for people to pay directly for services out of their own pockets. In countries that depend heavily on out-of-pocket payments, health bills push 100 million people into poverty each year. Public funding is key to reducing out of pocket expenditure. As public spending on health goes up, dependence on out-of-pocket payments declines.

This is also postulated in a recent WHO and World Bank Group report "Tracking universal health coverage - First global monitoring report". The report is the first kind of its kind to measure health service coverage and financial protection to assess countries' progress towards universal health coverage.

Read the press release...

• www.who.int