Nearly half of TB patients face financial ruin — and a new global framework aims to fix that. The WHO and ILO have released a monitoring and evaluation framework to help countries track progress toward ensuring 100% of people with TB access a health and social benefits package by 2027. The tool is designed to work across countries with varying social protection systems and data capacities.
TB doesn't just make people sick — it can devastate their finances. People with tuberculosis and their households routinely face steep costs tied to accessing care, lost wages, and reduced employment, pushing many into economic hardship. Now, the WHO and the International Labour Organization (ILO) are stepping up with a new tool to help countries do something about it.
The newly published monitoring and evaluation framework gives countries a practical, phased approach to tracking whether people with TB are actually being reached by health and social protection systems — and whether that support is timely, adequate, and comprehensive. It builds on existing national systems while progressively strengthening measurement capacity, making it adaptable across countries with different resources and data availability.
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Why it matters: Closing the social protection gap for TB patients isn't just a humanitarian goal — it's a public health strategy. Financial hardship is a key driver of treatment dropout, which fuels drug resistance and ongoing transmission. This framework gives countries the accountability tools to turn global commitments into real-world action.
