Analysis finds noncommunicable diseases get 2.5% of targeted aid

At Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, researchers turned 3.7 million development-aid projects into a map of who receives health funding—and who does not. Their machine-learning pipeline found that noncommunicable diseases account for around 60% of global disease burden, yet received only 2.5% of the disease-specific aid examined.

The team led by Professor Stefan Feuerriegel, director of LMU’s Institute for AI in Management, compared disease-specific funding with disease burden at both country and disease levels. The dataset, from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, covered projects from 2000 to 2022; around 320,000 were classified under 17 major disease categories, with a total volume of $332 billion.

The contrast runs in both directions. HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases received approximately 34% of aid between 2000 and 2021, while representing 6% of global disease burden. Similar discrepancies appeared for malaria, neglected tropical diseases and nutritional deficiencies. In Central Africa and parts of South Asia and West Africa, the researchers found clear regional gaps between funding and burden for various diseases.

And concretely? The pipeline gives aid planners a much finer view than a global funding total: they can compare individual countries and diseases, spot where the two diverge, and use that evidence when setting priorities. For political decision-makers, the immediate benefit is visibility—not an automatic spending order.

The researchers are careful about what the numbers can prove. They describe imbalances, not confirmed misallocation: cost efficiency and the specific characteristics of health systems may explain some choices. The findings were published in Nature Communications, and the figures come from the researchers’ analysis of the OECD dataset.