PHA-Exchange> Details of the World Bank Reproductive Health Scandal

[claudio at hcmc.netnam.vn]

 from David Woodward <David.Woodward at neweconomics.org> -----


Bank staff had prepared a new HNP strategy for 2007 to replace the previous 
1997 HNP strategy.  The new strategy was scheduled for Board approval on April 
24, 2007.  
In response a large number of groups mobilized to prevent Board approval of 
the new HNP draft. 
Civil society mobilization resulted in the Bank Board postponing approval of 
the HNP strategy by a week.  The approved strategy restores some content on RH 
but in the very circumscribed way.

This is a minor victory since the Bank continues to benefit and serve 
corporations rather than the poor - its claimed beneficiaries.  We must 
continue to fight to end this paradigm and eliminate de facto conditionalities 
like user fees that the new HNP strategy upholds.

(2) Content: "Healthy Development: the World Bank Strategy for Health, 
Nutrition, and Population Results" was approved by the Bank's Board on April 
30, 2007.  The strategy that claims to present "a new strategic vision" 
focuses mainly on health systems.  

Language on RH, family planning, and abortion sits very far into the HNP 
strategy. The first 63 pages of the 80 page strategy including the Executive 
Summary, Introduction, Strategic Objectives, Strategic Directions and 
everything else contained in the initial 80 percent of the strategy, totally 
ignore these issues.  Only pages 64-67 discuss them in a totally freestanding 
section.  So much for the Bank's promise to mainstream gender and reproductive 
health issues into all Bank work.  Abortion appears once in a description of 
the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) program 
that contains "prevention of unsafe abortion".  This section confirms the 
Bank's commitment to ICPD.

The strategy promotes a very retrograde position on user fees for HNP services 
in stating: "....user fees have a role to play as copayment when there is 
evidence of excess demand".  The strategy also states the Bank will support 
countries wanting to remove user fees from public facilities if lost revenues 
can be replaced in a fiscally sustainable way.  The strategy's user fee 
position is an example of the Bank's anti-poor practice while it claims to be 
pro-poor.



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