World Bank financing of $300 million to strengthen Indonesia's TB response programme
The new support from the World Bank is in line with its Country Partnership Framework 2021-2025
The World Bank's Board of Executive Directors has approved a $300 million loan to the Indonesian government to improve coverage, quality and efficiency of tuberculosis (TB) response in Indonesia.
Indonesia’s health system has seen increasing challenges to find and treat TB cases, especially since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Even before the pandemic, Indonesia was the third largest contributor to the global TB cases. In 2021, the country contributed around 9 percent of the total 10.6 million new TB cases worldwide. It had a TB incidence of over 969,000 people and lost more than 150,000 people annually because of this communicable disease.
The financing uses a results-based approach that will focus on three areas. The first area is strengthening Indonesia’s subnational TB response, such as case finding, treatment coverage, and timely response, and the performance in this area will be linked to a fiscal transfer.
The second is strengthening TB response among primary health providers, including private healthcare providers. The financing will help better connect private sector providers with the national programme, and making it easier for them to notify, diagnose, and treat TB by improving their access to diagnostics and medicines provided by the NTP.
The third is enhancing digital systems for TB and well-informed policies through creating an ecosystem aimed at minimising the reporting burden and improving data availability and reliability. This ecosystem will support better equity, access, and monitoring of the TB programme among the public and private sectors' healthcare.
Source: BioSpectrum Asia
