Can Hybrid Fundraising Save 11 Million Children a Year?
Can hybrid money-raising efforts by non-profits, foundations and governments help save the 11 million children under the age of 5 who die every year due to malnutrition and preventable disease? With increasingly imaginative fund raising efforts, the Economist provides reasons to hope that "a spoonful of ingenuity" can make a big dent in child mortality rates.
In the last 20 years, funding sources have diversified with foreign governments increasing the amount they're donating. An increasing amount now comes from corporations and private philanthropy. In 2007 the Gates Foundation alone provided more than all corporations and private philanthropists provided in 1990. There is a sea-change, but $22 billion is still not enough.
UNITAID are seeking and implementing new and innovative methods of finance, including taxes on air-tickets and from purchases on travel-websites; the hope is that every time someone books a flight, they kick in a couple of dollars. This scheme could raise an extra $1 billion a year to fight preventable diseases. This would add a massive 5 per cent to the global fund, and could save hundreds of thousands of lives, just through travelers donating a few dollars for each indulgent holiday and every business flight. Of course, the contribution of aviation to climate change (which hits the poor hardest, and kills 500,000 a year now) isn't mentioned but as long as people fly, it's right to make them pay extra.
The message is that begging for money doesn't work, and that some of the best ways to raise money is to show the tremendous work that is already going on, and to show how more lives can be saved with a little more money. Solely asking for more money isn't enough, people must be encouraged, and it must be made easy. Precise measurement of the effectiveness of aid, a little more transparency, and finding better ways of sharing of success stories can ensure that funding levels continue to rise.
But as we pointed out back in June, innovative financing mechanisms for global health won't provide the magic bullet we're hoping for. External funding will go some way to help millions of young children dying unnecessarily, but the Economist concludes that the change may not really come until the developing countries themselves start to take the burden and help themselves.
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