Access Accelerated and the World Bank partnered in 2017 to support governments to respond to pressing and emerging needs in addressing the growing burden of non communicable diseases (NCDs). The World Bank Group and Access Accelerated have been working together to accelerate sustainable and scalable solutions to NCD prevention, treatment, and care. The World Bank’s work through the partnership tells the story of impact at local, national, regional, and global levels. To date, resources from Access Accelerated funded small grant projects in over 35 countries, with several regional and global ones.
The World Bank grants supported by Access Accelerated informed the World Bank–financed projects and new projects amounting to investments of 3.7 billion dollars across the six years. The World Bank is the world’s leading health financing agency. Priorities of the World Bank include decreasing poverty and increasing shared prosperity, building human capital, and supporting countries to achieve universal health coverage. The World Bank’s health strategy includes three main pillars, and NCDs cut across all three of them. They include the expansion of financial protection so that no one is tipped into poverty because of catastrophic health spending. The second pillar is increasing coverage of quality health for the poorest 40 percent of the population. Lastly, the third pillar is to foster a healthy society, including investments that reduce risk factors. The World Bank’s collaboration with Access Accelerated demonstrates that there is only one way of achieving such outcomes in health, including addressing NCDs: by building resilient health systems with a strong foundation set in primary health care and public health.
By being needs-driven, multisectoral, and systemsoriented, the World Bank’s work with Access Accelerated created enabling policy environments for NCDs and established a new body of evidence that countries can look to tackle these diseases. The reach of the World Bank is possible not only because of its large multisectoral expertise, but because of its commitment to generating evidence, building local capacities, and providing technical support and analytical work.