The Marcos Jr. administration will borrow $509.24 million (about P28.7 billion) from the World Bank to enhance health services in rural areas.
World Bank documents showed that the Washington-based multilateral lender's board is expected to approve the Philippines Health System Resilience Project on Dec. 21, 2024.
This upcoming investment project financing will "improve utilization and quality of health services, and enhance health emergency prevention, preparedness and response in the project provinces," the World Bank said.
The Philippine government shall borrow on behalf of the Department of Health (DOH), which will implement the project.
This loan will cover 17 provinces and 11 "lagging" regions across the country, such as the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (BARMM).
The World Bank said more than a fifth of the targeted population belonged to indigenous peoples (IPs) and Muslim ethnic groups.
"While the Philippines has achieved considerable gains in the health outcomes and access to services over the last several decades, the health sector still underperforms in several key areas," the World Bank noted.
"As a result of the slow improvement, the country failed to achieve its Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) on health and nutrition and will likely fall short again with some Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) targets, such as under-five stunting, maternal mortality rate, tuberculosis incidence rate, and immunization coverage, without path-breaking reforms," the World Bank added.
It did not help that the prolonged Covid-19 pandemic "exploited and exacerbated" public health gaps in the country, the World Bank lamented.
As such, the World Bank wanted to finance this project in order to "rebuild a resilient health system, with an emphasis on investments in selected provinces to strengthen service delivery and enhance health emergency prevention, preparedness and response at lower levels."
The forthcoming World Bank loan will also "support digital transformation, institutional strengthening and capacity building programs at the national and local levels, enabling effective implementation on the ground."
Specifically, the DOH will establish climate-resilient provincial health systems; strengthen health emergency prevention, preparedness and response systems; build an enabling environment, project management, as well as monitoring and evaluation for this initiative; and also put in place contingent emergency response.