World Health Organization: an independent guardian of global health?

CHARLES UNIVERSITY FACULTY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES Institute of Political Studies Department of Political Science Abstract 2020 Kateřina Krestová Abstract A decade ago, the WHO decided to make a commitment of reforming itself. Above all, the funding situation was unsustainable. The main source of WHO's funding is voluntary contributions. Anyhow promising the term voluntary might seem, the reality is more complicated since the majority of these contributions is tightly earmarked towards specific programmes. Implying the WHO is not allowed to use the money where it is needed but it must be spent according to donor's wishes. This makes budgeting highly inflexible, the financing is imbalanced between categories and efficiency of fulfilling WHO's mandate declines. The reform launched in 2010 ought to fix these issues. This thesis evaluates the efficiency of the reform; firstly, total budget patterns are compared. Followingly, the attention is given to a specific category of Noncommunicable diseases due to its most severe underfunding. The analysis was conducted based on extensive datasets never gathered before comparing all types of contributions for every category from 1999 to 2019. Findings indicate unsatisfactory results of the reform; flexible sources have not increased, contrarily earmarked donations have...