Key Implementers of U.S. Global Health Efforts

Appendix A: Detailed Methodology

This report is based on Kaiser Family Foundation analysis of USAID global health funding data for FY 2015, which were provided to KFF on request by USAID staff working on the U.S. Foreign Assistance Dashboard website and by OGAC and Global Fund staff, and additional research on some of the funded organizations.

The analysis uses transaction-level data on funding disbursed by USAID to organizations for global health activities as well as the reported U.S. contribution to the Global Fund.¹ Data include funding that was appropriated by Congress to USAID for global health activities and then disbursed to organizations, as well as funding that was appropriated to other agencies for global health efforts, transferred to USAID, and then disbursed to organizations.² It does not include funding that was directly disbursed by other USG departments/agencies, such as the Department of State or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to organizations.

Funding totals are likely under-estimates, because some USAID spending has not been categorized into a specific category of activity (e.g., health, environment, economic development, etc.) in the transaction data and may include health funding.

Additionally, note:

• Organizations were classified by implementer type based on existing categories in the data, specifically non-profit organization (referred to as NGOs in the analysis³), for-profit (referred to as private sector in the analysis), educational institution, government, redacted (referred to as “not known” in the analysis, and public international organization (referred to as multilateral/international organizations in the analysis). The only exception to this were entries in the “not known” type that included the name of an implementing organization: six of these organizations appeared under a specific implementer type elsewhere in the data and were re-categorized accordingly, while eight of these organizations did not appear elsewhere in the data and were re-categorized using standard conventions. Five entries that included the name of an individual (which is usually redacted in this dataset) under the “not known” type were not re-categorized and were not counted as implementing organizations.
• It is possible that implementer type misclassifications by USAID are present in the data, meaning that one or more organizations may have been classified as a certain implementer type by USAID in the data when another type would have been more appropriate.
• Funding totals shown in this report represent net disbursements, which include positive and negative disbursed funding amounts as well as zero-dollar disbursed funding amounts. For zero-dollar transactions, we included only transactions we could verify as no-cost extensions.⁴
• The numbers of organizations reflected under each type were calculated based on available data, reflecting how each organization/entity appears in the data, where possible. It was not possible to calculate the number of organizations receiving funding included under the “not known” implementer type, due to redacted data on the implementing organization. Similarly, it was also not possible to precisely calculate the number of organizations receiving funding included under the non-profit organizations, private sector, and multilateral/international organizations types, due to redacted data on the implementing organization – resulting in small amounts of unattributed funding.
• Funding totals in this brief should not be compared with earlier KFF analyses of USAID global health spending via NGOs, due to several differences between the datasets examined (including the availability of data on transferred funding to USAID from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which was ultimately disbursed by USAID, in the dataset used for this analysis) as well as minor differences in methodology (including NGOs and other non-profit organizations not being delineated into distinct categories in this analysis, versus the prior analyses).