Topics

Health Systems & Financing

The World Bank's Health Systems & Financing (HSF) group is part of the Human Development Network's Health, Nutrition & Population Unit. The HSF group works on a number of issues related to health systems, including health finance, health insurance, human resources for health, pharmaceuticals, public/private partnerships and hospital management. HSF supports Bank projects through the development and dissemintation of knowledge and technical assistance. 

HIV/AIDS

AIDS is the only disease that strikes mainly prime-age adults -- parents, workers, teachers, health professionals, entrepreneurs, rich and poor. Higher funding levels, better data, and greater understanding of what works are helping countries to prevent new infections, treat people with HIV, and mitigate the impact on families and communities, but much remains to be done to reach global goals.

Nutrition

Nearly a half of child mortality in low-income countries can be linked to malnutrition. The World Bank supports a multisectoral approach to improving nutrition that targets the poor, especially young children and their mothers. To reach these groups, the Bank emphasizes two strategies -- First, community based programs that focus on the "window of opportunity between pre-pregnancy and the first 2 years of life" to improve nutrition; and second, micronutrient supplementation and fortification programs. These interventions are implemented through a multi-sectoral approach that includes agriculture and rural development, food policy reforms, gender, social protection programs and innovative demand-side strategies such as conditional cash transfers and involvement of the private sector.

Population/Reproductive Health

The World Bank has supported population and reproductive health activities since 1970, and has helped to finance more than 192 population and reproductive health projects in 83 countries. Today the Bank and its client countries, together with many other donors, are using new approaches to improving women's health and helping couples to plan their families. These include linking population policy more closely to poverty reduction and human development, and adopting a reproductive health approach that integrates family planning, maternal health, and prevention and treatment of sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV/AIDS. The World Bank has committed $4.2 billion to support reproductive health programs around the world.

Poverty & Health

The purpose of the Poverty & Health website is to introduce work in these areas recently undertaken or currently under way at the World Bank, in the hope that the information will prove useful to policy makers and analysts outside as well as within the Bank.

Diseases

The roles of the public health cluster in the Bank are to: manage and disseminate knowledge on public health and public health functions; conduct analytic work related to public health functions; engage in global health initiatives that will help countries make measurable progress towards their HNP goals; build capacity for poverty reduction, and; improve Bank and client performance.

Sub-topics include: Avian Flu | Malaria | Mental Health | Road Safety | School Health | Tobacco | Tuberculosis