Official development assistance (ODA) for medical research and basic health sectors per capita, by recipient country

Published: May 2025, data up to 2023

The Official Development Assistance (ODA) data are collected from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and are reported below for the year 2023 in US$ (not all countries have reported data on this indicator).

Benchmarking official development assistance (ODA) for medical research, by recipient and by donor country

What you see | Data sources | Previous Versions

What you see

The data visualization compares 2023 health ODA per capita in US$ by recipient country (chart C). Weighted averages are provided by WHO region and country income group (chart A and chart B).

Data were derived using two calculation methods for analysis – ‘weighted average’ and ‘median’.

Points to note:

The information on health ODA per capita is derived from 136 ODA recipient countries for which data are available.
As in previous years, the Africa region (chart A) received the highest weighted average health ODA per capita compared to the other regions.
However, if using median values, the Western Pacific region at the last position in weighted averages, comes first. This difference is accounted for by the large variability in both the amount of ODA for health received and the population in the countries of this region. For example, Nauru, the country receiving the most ODA in this region received 222.11 US$ per capita (2.64 million US$ in total) compared to 0.05 US$ per capita (1.76 million US$ in total) for Malaysia. (Select the Western Pacific region in chart A and explore the information by country in chart C by hovering on each bar).

To explore by country data (chart C) and differences with income group weighted averages or median (the income group weighted average or median is symbolized by a vertical dashed line and countries are color-coded by region):

Select a WHO region (chart A) or an income group (chart B) to compare countries according to the category of interest. For example:
--Selecting only Africa shows in chart C that:
- Sao Tome and Principe (a lower middle income country) received the highest amount of health ODA per capita (16.71 US$) compared to the other countries in this region with almost 4 times more health ODA per capita than the weighted average for this region and around 3 times the weighted average for its income group (Africa: weighted average 5.98 US$ per capita; lower middle income: weighted average 4.39 US$ per capita).
Selecting Africa in chart A, and only the low-income group in chart B shows in chart C that while Guinea-Bissau received around 2.5 times more (14.85 US$) health ODA per capita than the weighted average for this income group (6.60 US$), Ethiopia, at the bottom of the list, received less with 3.98 US$, around half the weighted average in this income group. This is less variability than in previous years.

Click on the drop-down icon next to “WHO Region” (chart A), “Income group” (chart B) and “Country” (chart C) to sort the values accordingly.
Hover the cursor on a bar in a graphic to see more information in a popup window.
Undo the selection by clicking ‘undo’ or ‘reset’ near the bottom of the page or by clicking the same element again.

Data sources

Previous versions