WHO says health funding to drop up to 40% in 2025, disrupting essential health services

Essential health services in low-and middle-income countries are being severely disrupted as external health aid is projected to fall by 30% to 40% in 2025 compared with 2023, the World Health Organization (WHO) warned on Monday.

In its new guidance to help governments respond to the crisis, the WHO said sharp, sudden funding cuts are reducing access to maternal care, vaccinations, disease surveillance and emergency preparedness by as much as 70% in some countries, according to survey data collected this March.

The data from 108 countries showed that over 50 countries have also reported job losses among health workers and interruptions to training programmes.

"Sudden and unplanned cuts to aid have hit many countries hard, costing lives and jeopardising hard-won health gains," WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said. "But in the crisis lies an opportunity for countries to transition away from aid dependency towards sustainable self-reliance, based on domestic resources."

Investment in 'social stability'

According to the WHO, this year's funding cuts have compounded years of persistent health financing challenges for countries, including rising debt burdens, inflation, economic uncertainty, high out-of-pocket spending, systemic budget underfunding and heavy reliance on external aid.

The agency urged policymakers to make health a political and fiscal priority in government budgets even during times of crises, "seeing health spending as not merely a cost to be contained, but an investment in social stability, human dignity, and economic resilience."

The guidance demanded countries to prioritise the health services accessed by the poorest, protect health budgets and essential health services, improve efficiency through better procurement, reduced overheads and strategic purchasing, use health technology assessments to prioritise services and products that have the greatest health impact per dollar spent.

The WHO said countries such as Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, Ghana and Uganda have already taken steps to boost health budgets and reform financing systems.