Funding landscape for research on health, migration and displacement

Published: October 2023

Presented below is an analysis of the landscape of funding for research on health, migration and displacement for the years 2016-2020. Data was sourced from the World RePORT and includes 9 of the major global health research funders. Grants are reported by funder, location of grant recipients, duration of grants, year, and by the 5 priority research themes in the WHO Global research agenda on health, migration and displacement. The Global  research agenda has been developed by the WHO Department of Health and Migration, working closely with the WHO Science Division and the Research for Health Department. See below for details on the scope, analysis, and limitation of this analysis.

See also:

What you see | Scope, analysis and limitations | Data sources 

What you see

The data visualization shows the:

• Number of grants and amounts by funder (chart A)
• Number of grants by :
  • WHO region (chart B)
  • Income group (chart C)
  • Country (chart D)
  • Duration of grants (chart E)
  • Year (chart F)
• Amount of grants by year (chart G)
• Number of grants and amounts by priority research themes (chart H)

Grants can also be viewed by specific year (select the year(s) of interest using top left tick boxes).

Note: In chart H, a grant can span more than one priority research theme; categories are not mutually exclusive. Throughout the dashboard, the grant amount per year represents its equivalent annual amount not the total value of the grant. See more on this in the Analysis section.

Points to note:

• The United States of America’s National Institutes of Health (NIH) awarded the highest total grant amount (approximately US$ 275.6 million; 69.5%), followed by the European Commission (EC) (approx. US$ 39.8 million;10%), and Wellcome Trust (approx. US$ 38.1 million; 9.6%), (chart A).
• 97% of the grants were awarded to recipients in the region of the Americas (408 grants; 77%) and the European region (106 grants; 20%) (chart B) with 97% of the grants awarded to countries in the high-income group (chart C).
• Less than 20% of all the grants were awarded for more than five years (chart E).
• The number of new grants remain similar throughout the period studied, except for 2019 when we noticed a slight increase (chart F) , same trend for their amounts (chart G).
• Core theme 3 of the Global research agenda (“Generate multisectoral research on addressing the determinants of health of migrants, refugees and other displaced populations”) has received more funding attention (approx. US$131.8 million) than the other priority research themes, with cross-cutting theme 2 receiving the least (approx. US$38.4 million).

To explore the data further

• Select one or multiple years in the top left tick boxes to filter the data for the desired year or period.
• Select a funder, a WHO region, a priority or any other category (by clicking on a bar in a chart or a cell in a table) to filter the data for the desired selection in the other charts. For example selecting NIH in chart A will show that the number of new grants awarded by this funder decreased in 2020 (from 47 to 24 grants) compared to the previous year .
• Hold the ‘Ctrl’ key on your keyboard to select more than one option.
• Hover the cursor on a bar or a cell in a table to see more information in a pop-up window.
• Undo a selection by clicking ‘undo’ or ‘reset’ near the bottom of the page or by clicking the same element again.

Scope, analysis and limitations of the data

Scope

• The World RePORT is hosted by the United States of America’s National Institutes of Health and managed through a steering committee of the agencies providing data.
• The World RePORT data include direct (primary) grants provided to recipient institutions as well as collaborations with other institutions resulting from these grants (indirect grants administered by recipient institutions). This data visualization focuses on the amount of the primary grants.
• Not all funders who provide data to World RePORT report on a yearly basis, and not all grants reported have corresponding amounts. The data used in this analysis were those available on World RePORT as of May 2023. 

Analysis

• Automated data mining was used to define if the grant is eligible for this analysis, using text-based data fields (programme titles and abstracts) with the following terms: migrant* OR migration* OR immigra* OR emigrat* OR refuge* OR asylum* OR displace* OR undocument* OR detain* OR unaccompan* OR traffick*
• The definition of migrant and forcibly displaced populations aligned with those included in the final WHO Global research agenda on health, migration and displacement. The inclusion and exclusion criteria for screening also aligned with the rapid reviews previously conducted by the Department of Health and Migration as part of the Global research agenda setting process.
• To ensure an efficient and reproducible strategy for screening and categorisation of funding records into each of the 5 themes of the Global research agenda, screening and categorisation was completed via a semi-automated process using programming software. This included conducting reproducible key word and phrase searches within the abstract field of the funding records.
• An analysis involving manual checks of the included and excluded records was undertaken using 100 randomly sampled program titles and abstracts to calculate the algorithm’s positive predictive value (PPV) and negative predictive value (NPV). While 99% NPV was achieved, the algorithm’s PPV was only 70%, with 84% of correctly included records assigned into the correct themes of the Global research agenda. As such, a step was added to manually exclude any remaining irrelevant records following the automated part of the process. To note: each grant could be assigned to more than one relevant theme.
• Investment figures in the World Report were available in various formats depending on the reporting practice of each funder. They varied either in terms of the currency used or the duration the grant represented: total grant for the entire duration of the project, financial disbursement for the financial year, or as the total disbursement from the start of the project until the end of the financial year. These were sometimes available with or without the actual amounts allocated to collaborating institutions. The Observatory reviewed the reporting practices of each funder and adjusted the investment figures, when needed, to the equivalent amount spanning one whole year. Grants in other currencies were converted into US dollars ($) using the World Development Indicators (WDI) official exchange rate.

Limitations of the data

• For some funders, especially those with relatively new or fixed data collection platforms, the data do not accurately reflect the scale of research investments. Most funders do not include their intramural investments which can be substantial.
• Reporting conventions for funding amounts are missing for some funders on the World RePORT platform. A cross-check between the data from the World RePORT and the data available from the reporting funders’ websites was therefore performed to determine the practice used.
• This analysis will be updated when new data becomes available; however, time lags with the scheduled updates by the data source are inevitable. Accuracy and completeness of the information is the responsibility of the data source, see terms and conditions of use.