Textbooks

2007-8 Africa Topic Guide

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Introduction

The World Health Organization (WHO) (internet site, Wikipedia) is a specialized agency with the United Nations (Wikipedia). WHO member states (drawn from U.N. membership with the addition of a few non-U.N. members) “appoint delegations to the World Health Assembly.” The World Health Assembly is “WHO’s supreme decision-making body.” One hundred and ninety-three member states make up the WHO.

The WHO is financed by contributions from member states and other private donors, such as private companies and the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation. Contributions from non-governmental entities now exceed the assessed member contributions.

There are two ways that the negative can run a WHO counterplan. First, the negative can argue that the WHO itself should do the plan. The WHO assembly can approve specific programs, and the negative could argue that it should approve doing the health care mandates of the affirmative plan. As discussed, the WHO has its own budget from which to draw resources. The WHO does have extensive experience with malaria control and the provision of AntiRetroviral Drugs (ARVS) (#1, #2)

Second, and more creatively, the negative could counterplan to essentially do the affirmative’s plan multilaterally. The counterplan could be worded to include things such as giving the affirmative’s funding to the WHO to facilitate the adoption of the plan by the WHO, having the WHO “coordinate” the affirmative’s plan with other actors in a way that may allow modification, or simply have the WHO vote to support the plan before it is implemented.

The Net-Benefits

The net-benefits that you should extend depend on which version of the counterplan that you run.

If you run the “WHO do the plan” version, you run the convention [politics] and [spending] disadvantages.

If you run the “coordinate with the WHO” version you need to run some different, but probably more interesting net-benefits.

First, remember to ditch the spending net-benefit because both the plan and the counterplan will spend the same amount of money.

Second, if you are going to extend [politics] as a net-benefit, you have to argue that multilateralism and/or WHO involvement are relatively more or less politically popular than the affirmative plan.

Third, you should make general arguments regarding the superiority of multilateral versus bilateral action. For general evidence on the debate, see our Hegemony Strategy Guide and evidence database. Also, there is an article here that explores the relative merits of bilateral vs. multilateral assistance. You may be able to argue that multilateral coordination of assistance increases its effectiveness because it reduces overlap and conflicts amongst aid providers. Since I believe that this is the way the U.S. would normally deliver this type of assistance, it probably best captures many of the affirmative solvency articles.

This version of the counterplan needs substantially greater development, and I plan on devoting more time to it during the month of July.

Which Version of the Counterplan is Better?

There are two significant problems with the “have WHO do it” version of the counterplan.

First, since the WHO is not capable of deficit spending, has limited resources, and likely has all of its existing resources dedicated to particular projects, a WHO decision to self-initiate the health care mandates of the affirmative plan would likely force a trade-off in other health programs.

Second, there is good evidence that WHO fails at disease eradication and only succeeds at information distribution

Third, any general “WHO solves” evidence that the negative might read may very well assume some coordinated U.S. support/action. In order to be competitive, the counterplan would have to necessarily exclude this.

Given these limits, I think the “coordination,” version of the counterplan is better. It is obviously under-developed at the moment, so I say that with some hesitation, but it certainly deserves more development.

World Health Organization (WHO) Counterplan Shell

The World Health Organization should… (insert plan mandates, absent the U.S. government action)

Contention I. Solvency

WHO SHOULD ACT TO BOOST AFRICA’S HEALTH CAPACITY

HealthGap.org, FACT SHEET: HEALTH WORKER CRISIS IN AFRICA, 2005, http://www.healthgap.org/camp/hcw_docs/HCWfactsheet.pdf

African countries must develop and implement strategic health workforce plans to increase service delivery so as to achieve the Millennium Development Goals and other health goals. In October 2005, African health ministers committed themselves to prepare and implemented costed human resources for health development plans so as to achieve universal access to care and treatment by 2015. The World Health Organization and other health and development agencies should provide and facilitate the necessary technical support.

2010-11 Policy Resources