Meet the Global Health Family: A Cheat Sheet

This is a joint post with Rachel Silverman.

Through our Value for Money working group, we’ve spent much of the past year immersed in the world of global health funding agencies. With so many new agencies, particularly in the last quarter century (Figure 1), understanding the intricacies of the global health family can be daunting, even for the most devoted observers.

Figure 1: Timeline of Selected Entrants to the Global Health Family, 1902 – 2006

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Source: Meet the Global-Health Family

For our own reference (and yours), we thought it would be useful to compile a “cheat sheet” on global health funding agencies. We used the public websites of global health funders shown in Figure 1 (supplemented by IHME’s Financing Global Health) to compile key “stats” for large global health players. Our compilation is available online as a background brief.  We include:

• Table 1: The basics: who, what, when, where, how
• Table 2: Who gives, and how much (contributions)?
• Table 3: Who’s in charge (governance)?
• Table 4: The ABCs of global health agencies

We hope that this resource provides a useful overview for novices and veterans alike who are trying to make sense of the complicated global health landscape and architecture. Let us know if you have any feedback or suggestions – either below as a comment or by email – to make this resource more useful or accurate!

Victoria Fan (@fanvictoria) is a research fellow and Rachel Silverman (@rasiiii) is a research assistant at the Center for Global Development.