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From Emergency Relief to Sustained Response: Examining the Role of the Private Sector in Financing HIV/AIDS Services

This paper examines private sector contributions, as compared to donor and public sector investments, to HIV/AIDS financing in five sub–Saharan African countries: Kenya, Malawi, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Zambia. We use data not commonly associated with the private sector – National Health Accounts (NHA). NHA is a tool for comprehensively tracking resources for health care, including public, private, and donor contributions. It follows the flow of funds through a country's health care system, making it possible to answer the following questions: How much money was spent? Where do the funds come from? Who manages the money? Where and how is the money spent? While other papers have documented funding for HIV/AIDS services at the macro level, the use of NHA data allows for closer inspection of the flow of funds through the health system at the country level (Bernstein and Sessions, 2007). To our knowledge, this is the first application of NHA data to an examination of private sector contributions to financing HIV/AIDS services.