The World Bank failed to follow through on its pledges to spend up to US$500 million to combat malaria, let its staff working on the disease shrink to zero, used false statistical data to claim success and wasted money on ineffective medicines, according to a group of public health experts writing in the British medical journal The Lancet.
The experts, in an article that was to be published online yesterday, argue that the bank should relinquish the money it has to fight malaria, which kills an African child every 30 seconds, and instead let the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria distribute the bank's malaria funds.
The bank conceded in a written reply to the article that its malaria programs were understaffed and underfinanced, but denied using false statistics or paying for obsolete medicines. It said that in the past year it had revitalized its malaria program.
Bank officials said in an interview on Monday that the number of staff members working on malaria has grown from none to more than 40 in the past year, while US$62 million in new spending has recently been approved, an amount expected to rise to US$190 million by June. The Global Fund does not have staff on the ground in Africa to monitor how the money is spent, while the bank does, they said.
"The story captures a lot of the bank's shortcomings from a year ago," Suprotik Basu, a public health specialist in the bank's malaria program, said on Monday. "But now we've had a year of progress."
In 1998, when the bank began the Roll Back Malaria campaign, it promised to spend US$300 million to US$500 million to help halve the number of malaria deaths in a decade.
The authors found it disturbing that the bank did not know how much it had given or lent for malaria programs: "That the bank's management tolerates such vague accounting when serving ... the African states to whom it pledged an increase in malaria control funds, is extraordinary."
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