Access to health
Why it matters
One of the greatest threats to resilience in low-income and low-middle-income countries is a healthcare supply that falls far short of need. Most primary healthcare facilities are understaffed, and staff are often inadequately trained and lightly monitored. Shortages of medicine are chronic. In some remote areas, many people can’t access professional care at all.
A multitude of barriers and challenges still exist which prevent the achievement of universal health coverage in low-middle income countries. Health expenditures push an estimated 100 million people worldwide into extreme poverty every year. Without a financial safety net, a single illness can threaten the health and well-being of entire families. Many avoid or postpone necessary hospital visits or end up receiving substandard care simply because it’s all they can access. Also, poor families often pay for healthcare in ways that leave them worse off in the long run, for instance, by selling livestock or eating less food
Definition
Disaster risk reduction (DRR) is a systematic approach to identifying, assessing and reducing the risks of disaster. It aims to reduce socioeconomic vulnerabilities to disaster as well as to deal with the environmental hazards that trigger them.
Our target group
Our target group: people who are vulnerable to disaster risk and who live in low- and low- to middle-income countries, particularly in Asia and Latin America.
Areas of support
We focus on the following three areas of engagement:
1. Improving risk identification and understanding and making this risk knowledge available to all, in particular to governments and organisations that support the most vulnerable communities. We support non-proprietary knowledge creation (eg risk models and risk exposure and vulnerability datasets and maps) and improvements in the use of risk knowledge (eg through technical assistance).
2. Supporting public-private partnerships in DRR that can anchor relevant knowledge, tools and approaches in countries with volatile climate conditions.
3. Supporting innovative and scalable approaches of financial disaster risk protection where these are not available.
Targets
We support projects which aim to generate impact along these lines:
- People reached
- People improving their resilience
- Number of organisations and or countries improving resilience (eg through deployment of risk knowledge and tools)
- Financial assets mobilised
- Environmental benefit (such as km2 of land protected by DRR measures)
