Less public money is going to health. So maximising its impact is critical. Yet finding data about who funds what and where the gaps are is needlessly hard. So we built The ONE Data Agent, an AI-powered search tool that makes it fast and easy to find health spending data.
If you want to know how much gets invested in healthcare in Afghanistan, Nicaragua, or Zambia, good luck. Finding reliable data on health spending can be incredibly difficult and time consuming—even if you know where to look.
It shouldn’t be this way.
That’s why we built The ONE Data Agent. It makes it easier than ever to track who is spending what to make people healthier.
An age of miracles…interrupted
The past 30 years has been an age of miracles. Life expectancy increased from 64 to 73. The number of children dying before their fifth birthday declined by more than half. Diseases like HIV/AIDS that were previously a death sentence are now preventable and treatable.
This did not happen by accident. It was the result of a major expansion in health spending, technological innovations, and a concerted plan to drive down costs and expand access to health services.
The age of miracles has been interrupted.
COVID-19, inflation, conflict, and economic headwinds mean that governments are cutting health budgets to finance expensive debt. Meanwhile, aid donors are cutting health spending overseas to balance the books and prioritise spending at home.
That’s a problem with implications for everyone. COVID-19 showed us that viruses don’t respect borders and can have devastating impacts on the health of our loved ones as well as our bank balances. Poor health is linked to less learning, lower productivity, and slower economic growth, hindering innovation and global trade.
In an age of frugality, data matters more than ever
With scarce public money available to finance health systems, knowing where the money is going and its impact is more critical than ever.
Yet, in an age of information and AI, answering basic questions like “how much is my government spending on HIV/AIDS” is surprisingly difficult. Too often that data is buried in difficult-to-navigate databases and portals.
As a result, priority programs don’t get funded, people get sick, and scarce resources are not maximised.
It shouldn’t be this way. People’s lives and livelihoods depend on informed and rapid health financing decisions.
Introducing The ONE Data Agent
The ONE Data Agent is an AI-powered tool that transforms access to global health financing data, helping you find the data you need in seconds instead of hours, days or…never.
Powered by ONE Data and Google’s Data Commons, the ONE Data Agent aggregates tens of millions of data points from trusted sources into one platform that you can talk to.
Simply type a query using plain language (no jargon required), and it finds the most relevant data from trusted sources in seconds, enabling you to make better informed decisions faster.
- It’s up to 60 times faster than alternative data gathering.
- It’s always accurate, with safety protocols that eliminate the risk of AI hallucination.
- It enables instant download of precise data and custom charts, complete with linked sources to official datasets.
We’ve trained The ONE Data Agent on health data. But the technology is universal, and we’ll soon apply it to new issues and themes.
Getting under the hood of health financing
Health financing data is too hard to find, requires technical knowledge to interpret, and is beset by technical barriers that make the time from data to insight longer than it should be.
The OECD and World Health Organisation work with governments to collect, validate, and publish data.
The WHO’s Global Health Expenditure Database (GHED) contains over 4,100 variables, a companion 64-page methodology, and a lengthy codebook that’s necessary to decipher the data. The OECD reports data for 50 donor countries, over 140 aid recipient countries and territories, and over 200 multilateral institutions.
That complexity can make traditional databases hard to use to quickly find what you need.
Data can have lags of up to three years, making it virtually impossible to get an accurate picture of current health spending gaps and trends. And data gaps leave significant blind spots for policymakers.
Even the best databases have data gaps
Percent of available data by country and year in WHO's Global Health Expenditure Database
ONE Data’s experts poured over thousands of indicators and millions of data points to build an AI agent that sources the data you need in seconds. While most AI tools suffer from hallucinations, The ONE Data Agent is curated by real experts and never touches the numbers. It simply finds them fast so you can work with data you trust.
New Insights in Health Financing
Using The ONE Data Agent, we have uncovered new insights into the messy world of health financing.
Who really pays for healthcare: governments, donors, or patients?
It depends where you live. If you’re in a low-income country, you’re more likely to pay a higher portion of health expenses out of pocket than those in high-income countries.
While headlines are dominated by donor cuts to health in low- and middle-income countries, we used The ONE Data Agent to help discover who really bears the burden of health financing.
Combining financing for domestic health systems with UN population data reveals that 2.5 billion people live in countries where the people spend more out of their own pocket on healthcare than their governments and external donors, combined. In contrast, in high-income countries, governments spend more than three times what their citizens spend out-of-pocket on healthcare, on average.
It took just a few minutes to generate this insight using The ONE Data Agent.
Which countries are most exposed to cuts in international funding for health?
In the past two years, several donor governments—including Belgium, France, Germany, UK, and US—have significantly cut their aid budgets. This has jeopardized lives and decades of health progress. Which countries are most exposed and how will they fill the gap?
Using The ONE Data Agent, we looked at the countries most exposed to US health funding and matched that with their levels of debt vulnerability. We found that US health aid was 25% or more of domestic health spending in 28 countries; over 60% of those countries are in or at high risk of debt distress.
This information can help policymakers prioritise where action on debt could unlock fiscal space for health.
Improved data can reveal impacts on real people
Each morning, mothers gather outside the health center in Nkope, Malawi, a rural clinic on the shores of picturesque Lake Malawi. Some spend several hours walking 15 kilometres (9 miles) carrying their infants, in hopes that medicines are in stock. If not, they face a difficult choice: wait and hope that medicines soon arrive, make their way to the closest hospital some 27 kilometres (17 miles) away (a 6 hour trip on foot), or go without treatment for themselves and their children.
Using The ONE Data Agent, we discovered that 54% of financing for primary healthcare in Malawi came from external sources in 2019 (the most recent year for which data is available) and US health financing was nearly double (194%) Malawi’s domestic health spending in 2022. That reality, combined with the fact that Malawi is in debt distress, means that the Nkope clinic is particularly vulnerable to international aid cuts.
Which countries have reached the recommended level of public health financing?
Experts recommend that countries should spend at least 5% of their GDP and US$86 per capita on health to ensure that all citizens have access to primary healthcare services.
Using The ONE Data Agent, we found that not a single low-income country—and only a handful of lower-middle-income countries—achieves that investment level, whereas the majority of high-income countries exceed it. View the data in The ONE Data Agent.
To put that into perspective, Malawi would have to spend more than half of its total 2022 government budget on health to meet that target. That’s 16 times what the government is actually spending on health.
Generating this analysis for Malawi took us under two minutes.
Why this matters
Adequate is critical for delivering functioning health systems and ensuring that everyone has access to reliable, high-quality healthcare.
Investments in health yield a significant return: Healthy people are likely to live longer, be more productive, be better educated, and are a key driver of economic development. That’s a win for individuals, communities, countries, and the world.
Here are just a few of the many ways in which health spending impacts people’s lives, highlighting the value of understanding how money gets spent.
Increased health spending leads to longer lives
Using The ONE Data Agent, we uncovered a strong correlation between life expectancy and per capita health spending. This supports a large body of scholarly research that finds a positive relationship between increased health spending and health outcomes, including life expectancy.
And it validates research that suggests that boosting government financed healthcare while decreasing out-of-pocket spending leads to higher life expectancy, reductions in under-5 mortality, and decreased risk of catastrophic health expenditures.
View the spending data in The ONE Data Agent
Health financing just got a lot easier to find
That’s why we built the ONE Data Agent. It helps you access the data you need in seconds. It uses AI to search health financing data points from trusted global sources.
So instead of spending time finding data, you can focus on what the data means and act on it. Take a quick tour.