World Bank offers US $30 million boost to health

The World Bank has approved a US $30 million supplemental grant to support the Afghan government’s efforts to extend basic health services in the war-ravaged country, the bank said in a statement on Tuesday.

"This package of health services which we are financing is the most effective and equitable means of improving the health of Afghans," Benjamin Loevinsohn, a World Bank public health specialist, said in the press release.

"This grant will help ensure expansion of health services to rural areas where hundreds of thousands of people, mainly women and children, die every year because no such service exists,” Loevinsohn noted.

Afghan health minister Said Mohammad Amin Fatimi said the grant would boost basic health services in areas still suffering from lack of healthcare across the country. The under-five mortality rate in 2003 in Afghanistan was 257 per 1,000 live births – the fourth highest in the world.

“The grant, which is for the next 18 months, would increase nationwide health coverage from 77 percent to 81 percent,” Fatimi told reporters at a press conference on Wednesday in the capital Kabul.

“We would use this money for polio eradication, control of measles and to help health workers to better provide and manage health services,” Fatimi explained, adding the health ministry was planning to train 200 midwives and 1,000 health workers across the country with the money.

Due to the high infant and under-five mortality rates, life expectancy in Afghanistan is only 43 years. The nutritional status of women and children is also very poor. Thirty-nine percent of children under five are underweight, and more than half of Afghan children suffer from chronic malnutrition, according to the World Bank.

The grant will also finance the expansion of basic health services in eight new areas across the country where no clinics have been established and where health services have rarely been provided.

The World Bank has contributed over $900 million to post-war Afghanistan since 2002, with the major component being soft loans.