Sources

Health financing policies:

The health financing policy information provided in this website attempts to provide comparative up-to-date information on the health financing mechanisms used by the ‘Countdown to 2015’ countries. For each country a small table provides the WHO figures in four areas:

- General government expenditure on health (GGEH) as a percentage of total health expenditure (THE)
- Private health expenditure (PvtHE) as a percentage of total health expenditure(THE).
- General government expenditure on health (GGEH) as a percentage of general government expenditure (GGE). In Abuja, Nigeria in 2001 African Heads of State committedthemselves to allocating at least 15% of annual government budgets to their health sectors.
- Out of pocket expenditure (OOP) as a percentage of all private health expenditure (PvtHE):
Figures of per capita expenditure on health in US dollars are taken from the Countdown 2015 Country Profiles. http://www.countdown2015mnch.org

Data on User Fees is mainly taken from the HLSP paper by Sophie Witter “Mapping user fees for health care in high mortality countries: evidence from a recent survey,” published by the HLSP Institute in 2010. Although its sample sizes were small it is the only relatively comprehensive survey of its kind.

Readers should be aware of various other caveats as to the reliability and completeness of this data.
- Generalisations are based on the available evidence, which may be drawn from small scale surveys and not be accurate across whole countries.
- Where surveys have been referred to they may be biased towards “official” views.
- In some cases no recent data was found and descriptions may therefore have been overtaken by more recent events.
- Sources of data are given where appropriate. However, the variety of sources means that facts and figures may vary quite widely and be calculated in ways that are not validly comparable.
Caution is therefore needed when using any of this data.
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Source for the 11 Indicators characterising each country:

INDICATOR	SOURCE
Health exp per capita ($)	World Bank
Maternal Mortality Ratio (MMR)	World Bank
Under 5 mortality Rate (U5MR)	World Bank
HIV Prevalence	World Bank
Malaria Incidence	UN
Education index	UNDP
GDP ($)	World Bank
Life expectancy at birth	UNDP
Proportion of the population that is urban	World Bank
Proportion of the population below poverty line	World Bank (percentage of the population living on less than $1.25 a day at 2005 international prices)
Population (millions) (*)	World Bank

* Note that we work with the logarithm (base 10) of the population, but that the display will be population.

For each country we use the most recent estimate. Not all countries will have estimates for all indicators – for countries where an indicator is missing, use the regional (e.g. African or Asian) average for that indicator.