The Premed Perspective From Switzerland: Part IV
In February, our public health class visited the Global Fund and the WHO, and the subsequent discussion on the involvement of the private sector in global health was the inspiration for this post.
Until now, I’ve only ever really thought of the involvement of private organizations as beneficial to global health. Yesterday’s discussion opened my eyes to the caveats of having such powerful private organizations actively engaged in the global health.
It turns out that the amount of money the Gates Foundation spent in 2007 is around the same as the WHO’s entire budget for that same year. While that is incredible in terms of funding opportunities, it also raises the following question: who controls the global health agenda? How does funding allocation really get decided, and what are the politics behind who gets left behind?
While the WHO is undoubtedly the center of global health initiatives and coordination, I can’t help but wonder at the balance of power between public organizations, including the WHO and UNICEF, and private organizations like the Gates Foundation. The intersection of these actors is what has allowed us to make progress in so many subfields, but it has also resulted in some interesting politics that influence which issues have priorities in global health.
While I got the general sense that private organizations definitely influence which issues get the most funding for research, treatment and prevention, visiting the Global Fund and the WHO made me realize how nontransparent funding for global health is. It would be useful to know which regions are being funded by which; for example, does the United States (USAID) only fund certain regions due to limited resources and political interests? Are certain other regions being skipped because they are lower on the political totem pole?
Image Source: Anadolu Agency
I think it would be incredibly powerful to create a platform that acts as a database for different funding sources, organizations and actors in global health. Not only would it bring transparency to which issues are getting funding and which aren’t, but it would also be interesting to understand the flow of money across the world. For example, I envision a database which allows anyone to search by sector and see:
- Which countries are donating and how much
- Where the money is flowing to
- Which sector (sanitation, communicable diseases, noncommunicable diseases, etc) is getting the most or least money
- What organizations in a specific sector are doing and where they are working
Of course, creating a database like this would be a huge undertaking. There’s a reason it hasn’t happened yet–getting the necessary detailed financial information from NGOs and corporations is challenging. It could be argued that recipient organizations are profiting from the information gap, making them unlikely to relinquish data. Unfortunately, I have more questions than answers, but I hope that as time goes on, we’ll have a better sense of the consequences of the fragmentation in global health, as well as the benefit and feasibility of creating a platform like the one I briefly outlined above. And, of course, if any of you have any thoughts, comments, or concerns on my ideas, please feel free to comment!
Feature Image Source: Pedro Szekely
< Part III: Public Health: USA vs. Switzerland | Part V: The Business of HIV Drugs >
