On January 16th, Bloomberg published an article about patient’s rights abuses at private healthcare facilities that received funding from the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the arm of the World Bank that invests in for-profit businesses. Patients and relatives relate their disconcerting experiences of being denied access to healthcare and being detained until paying their medical bills.
In 2022, based on a study, Wemos cautioned the IFC about their lack of attention for health equity in their investments. We noticed increased investments in health between 2017 and 2021. These focused on improving quality and availability of health services and products, but almost never considered whether everyone can actually access them. We found that only one of the 88 IFC projects in health in this period mentioned equitable access as an expected development impact.
One of the main recommendations we formulated and shared with the IFC was this one:
The decision to invest in private providers should be made after considering implications on equitable access to care during the impact assessment. For example, investing in high-end private hospitals is unlikely to contribute to equitable access to healthcare and can draw scarce resources (like health workers) away from lower-level health centres.
The cases that Bloomberg now reports on, indicate that this recommendation is still very valid today. Any investment in healthcare made by development institutions should ensure it decreases the disparity in access to healthcare, instead of increasing it. This is even more true for development institutions whose mandate is to care for the most vulnerable, like the Global Financing Facility for Women, Children and Adolescents (GFF).
In light of these findings. we believe the GFF should reconsider its collaboration with the IFC, especially when this collaboration means using scarce GFF resources to attract investment in private hospitals and clinics. In the upcoming five-year strategy (2026-2030), we hope the GFF will make potential cooperation with the IFC conditional on clear evidence that IFC investments directly support the GFF’s goal: improving access to quality care for women, children and adolescents from the lowest income groups.
Picture by Andrys Stienstra via Pixabay.
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