An inflated claim of health success in Afghanistan exposed

[unhappycamper]

An Afghan health worker treats a child, as other children stand on line outside a clinic in Kandahar province, south of Kabul, Afghanistan on Nov 7.


An inflated claim of health success in Afghanistan exposed
By Aunohita Mojumdar, Correspondent / December 8, 2010

Kabul, Afghanistan - Nine years and billions of dollars into the Afghanistan war the US government is eager to show progress.

The US government estimates 6 million refugees have returned to the country and some 7 million children are back in school. And then there is the widely cited claim that 85 percent of Afghans that have access to healthcare, as in this recent report from the US Agency for International Development: “USAID and other donors have worked so that now more than 85 percent of the population has access to some form of health care, up from 9 percent in 2002."

There's just one problem, say healthcare officials in Afghanistan. That claim, also peddled by the British government’s aid agency, the World Bank and at times by the Afghan government, isn't true. And healthcare workers say it's created a false sense of accomplishment that's actually undermining efforts to improve health services for Afghans.

Though it's been repeated over and over, it's not hard to see how unlikely it is. If 85 percent of Afghan's did have access to healthcare, Afghanistan would be ahead of every country in the region after three-decades of almost non-stop war.

Both the Afghan government’s Minister of Health as well as the Representative of the World Health Organization (WHO) in Afghanistan say that the claim is misleading. According to the Ministry of Health, which provided the initial data, the claim stems from a misunderstanding of the fact that 85 percent of Afghanistan's districts have at least one basic health facility.

[social_critic]

1. I just watched "Brothers" again

It's a pretty good movie. And the war in Afghanistan is such a waste for those young guys who get sent there. I sure wish there were a better way to inform potential US armed forces recruits about these wars, and how wasteful they are, and of the way they are being abused by the government. They think they fight for US freedom and so on, and don't realize they are the same as the Soviet forces which invaded Afghanistan. And I don't want to discuss Iraq, where some of the US behavior has been nazi-like.