UN Week Roundup

Posted on September 22, 2011 by Millennium Foundation

This month is always a boom time for eye-opening reports on the state of global poverty, as world leaders gather in New York for the annual United Nations General Assembly. Activists, researchers, development officials and everyone concerned with improving the state of the world’s poor all chime in to convince leaders to act. Yet it can be a daunting task to sort through both the sobering statistics and hopeful success stories.

We’re most concerned with the state of global health here at the Millennium Foundation and the 66th General Assembly has been flush with new data. In this post, we’ve tried to curate what we learned before, during and after this year’s “UN Week:”

Malaria Successes:

In early September, before the masses arrived in New York, the Roll Back Malaria Partnership (RBM) released what was probably the best news the whole month: According to their research, global malaria deaths have dropped by an estimated fifth over the last decade. This means that over a million lives have been saved thanks to more funding, in the form of malaria drugs and mosquito bed-nets.

According to the report, 43 countries have cut malaria deaths by 38%, with 11 of them in Africa. A decade ago, malaria-bearing mosquitoes reaped a grim toll in sub-Saharan Africa, with children and pregnant mothers the most at risk. Now for the first time, it is possible to imagine zero malaria deaths in the near future. “The results of the past decade exceed what anyone could have predicted and prove that malaria control is working,” said Robert Newman, director of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) global malaria program.

MDG Progress:

September is the anniversary of the 2000 United Nations Millennium Summit, when leaders of 189 countries agreed to the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Today, these goals provide concrete guidelines for the global fight against poverty. A question on everyone’s mind last week: How are we doing?

According to the UN’s Millennium Development Goal (MDG) Gap Task Force Report, last year was a record year for development aid, with $129 billion provided by donor countries. Yet experts agree that without new funding, these targets will not be met by the deadline in 2015. “There is a troubling distance between what we have promised and what we are actually doing to support the global partnership for development,” said UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon at the report’s launch.

But the report made room for successes as well. UNITAID, the drug-purchasing facility that financed MASSIVEGOOD, was mentioned for its success in bringing down HIV drugs prices, a key challenge in meeting MDG 6: Fight HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis. According to the report:

In cooperation with the Clinton HIV/AIDS Initiative (CHAI), UNITAID has provided predictable funding for large-scale purchases of pediatric ARVs. [Child-friendly HIV treatments] The results have been most impressive: the average number of suppliers per pediatric product has doubled, the coverage of treatment of children in need increased from 10 per cent in 2005 to 38 per cent in 2008 and the price of quality AIDS medicines for children has dropped by 60 per cent since 2006.

But other goals remain distant, especially the MDGs of ending childhood and maternal mortality (see below). At the beginning of the month, the WHO said that only seven African countries were on track to meet the fourth MDG on reducing child mortality by 2015, according to Devex. Only two countries are on track to achieve the fifth MDG on maternal mortality.

Moreover, despite UNITAID’s successes in lowering drug prices, overall funding for the fight against HIV/AIDS actually dropped by 10%, according to a study this August by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS. They found that donor governments disbursed US$ 6.9 billion in 2010 for HIV prevention, treatment, care and support—US$ 740 million less than in 2009.

As clinical trials this summer showed that HIV treatments can also be used to prevent transmission of the disease, public health experts now worry that funding shortfalls could endanger these incredible breakthroughs.

Health Workers

While many activists focused on obtaining more monetary commitments to improve global health, others focused on the human face of the public health profession – the frontline workers that provide the care. No matter how much money is raised in high-level meetings in Manhattan, it is the local community worker in India or the district nurse in Uganda that saves lives. As Jonathan Glennie argued on the Guardian’s “Poverty Matters Blog,” 3.5 million more public and NGO health workers are needed worldwide.

All throughout UN Week, international charity Save the Children led a campaign to raise awareness about the need for health workers. Last week the charity held an event in Times Square, gathering supporters, activists and celebs like Alexis Bledel to hold up parts of a “human mosaic,” seen in the photo above. The event helped get the message out that there are children in the world who are dying due to a lack of health workers. According to Save the Children, one single health worker can reach 5,000 children per year with life saving treatment.

Save the Children also found a direct correlation between health workers and child mortality in one of the more interesting studies released in the run-up to UN Week. The charity’s Health Worker Index rates the best and worse countries for a child to fall sick in. 161 countries are rated based on availability of trained health workers. Chad and Somalia are at the bottom of the index, while Switzerland and Finland are at the top.

According to Sarah Boseley’s Global Health Blog on the Guardian:

It stands to reason. Children die of malnutrition, of diarrhea, of malaria, of pneumonia and many other diseases in the poorest countries in the world. They need treatment, but often it is not just the drug or the food supplement that is lacking – it is the nurse or the community health worker who can diagnose what is wrong and do something about it. In some places, children never see a health worker in their sometimes pitifully short lives.

Women’s Health:

Last September saw a landmark in global health, with the creation of Every Woman Every Child, a strategy to save 16 million women and children by 2015. It wasn’t a coincide that UN

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon launched this in 2010, on the 10^th anniversary of the MDG summit: As mentioned above, maternal health is one MDG that lacks significant commitment, with 350,000 women still dying each year from complications related to pregnancy and birth. As part of this strategy, $40 billion was pledged by governments, NGOs and companies.

This year, the World Health Organization issued its first review with a great bit of news – the strategy has attracted the support of numerous private sector partners. This includes a partnership with Johnson & Johnson to train health workers in Tanzania and Ethiopia – the first-ever corporate grant to a joint UN program. Read about this initiative and more here.

But behind these commitments lie the hard facts. The stats are difficult – after all, behind every number is a mother who died in what is supposed to be the most precious time in a parent’s life, the birth of a newborn. On September 19^th, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington released promising but still unacceptable stats:

- Under-5 child deaths declined from 11.6 million in 1990 to 7.2 million deaths in 2011

- Maternal mortality has also continued to decline, from 409,100 deaths in 1990 to 273,500 deaths in 2011

First UNWTO conference on ethics and tourism – Can we do more?

Posted on September 19, 2011 by Millennium Foundation

Spain holds a special place in our hearts at the Millennium Foundation, as it’s the first country in which we fully rolled out our micro-donation solution MASSIVEGOOD. From airline Iberia to online ticketing agency Rumbo, the travel industry there has united to give their customers the chance to donate for global health causes.

So for us, it was completely appropriate that the first-ever conference on ethics and tourism took place last week in Madrid, organized by the Spanish General Secretariat of Tourism and Domestic Trade and the UN World Tourism Organization (UNWTO). After all, the Spanish tourism sector has shown tremendous courage and desire to innovate, despite the economic crisis. [To see this enthusiasm in play, we curated twitter feeds during the conference, to show how #ethics and #tourism buzzed].

At the end of the conferece, two of our major partners in Spain, Amadeus and Iberia, joined Spain’s largest tourism companies to sign a “Global Code of Ethics for Tourism.” Spain’s Crown Prince Felipe was there for the signing, along with tourism industry professionals from all over the world. Another first for Spain, this Code of Ethics is a set of principles designed to guide the development of tourism in a way that maximizes the socio-economic benefits of the sector. “A tourism sector without an ethical conscience can harm our planet,” said Taleb Rifai, Secretary-General UNWTO.

We were there as well, to talk about how the travel industry – which generates almost one out of every ten dollars spent in the global economy – can get their customers involved in ethical tourism by generating more money for the fight against poverty.

“This is not the time to take our foot of the pedal,” our Managing Director Henk Mulder told the conference. “There has been some progress on the health-related Millennium Development Goals, but with a looming financial crisis and decreases in development budgets, we are not on track to meet these targets by 2015.”

So how can travel companies bridge this gap? Our partners had some good answers.

According to Felipe González-Abad, Senior Advisor of Amadeus IT Group, by applying business sense to charity, his company can develop products that can do good. “We don’t have a whole pile of money set aside for charity,” he said during a session on corporate social responsibility (CSR). “Instead we’ve tried to use everything in our chain of value as a technology company to develop projects and do what we are best at.”

We’d agree! Amadeus designed our donation technology, which can be integrated into any travel booking platform.

For Berta Valverde, Publicity and Corporate Sponsorship Director at Iberia, CSR must be aligned with a company’s core business. “What transport people and goods by air so for corporate social responsibility, we try to offer these same services,” she said. “Whether it is bringing children from developing countries to get treated in Spain or making space in the cargo hold for humanitarian good, we do what we do best.”

Despite these commitments, action will need to be taken quickly in order to really make a difference with further economic turmoil looming. As with the financial crisis in 2008, both developed and developing countries stand to suffer from increased economic woes. Just this August, a report from UNAIDS showed that Western government support for HIV/AIDS in poor countries dropped 10% in 2010. As both Iberia and Amadeus have shown, the travel industry could use its strengths to make up for these shortfalls, especially with with nearly one billion tourists crossing international borders.

“We need to place ethics, responsibility and sustainability at the core of all our actions,” said Mr. Rifai.

Iberia's Berta Valverde speaks

Blogging for UNITAID in Cameroon

Posted on September 5, 2011 by Millennium Foundation

The intricacies of global health financing are difficult to explain in a short blog post, tweet or web video. A complicated network of development agencies and charities provides desperately needed funds in developing countries, a global partnership that can be daunting to describe even though its impact has saved thousands of lives.

Yet a group of bloggers did a fantastic job last month in Cameroon, by telling the story of the critical work carried out by UNITAID in sub-Saharan Africa. They explained UNITAID’s unique model not through 200-page reports, but with light, informative and compelling posts.

Here at the Millennium Foundation we admit we have a soft spot in our heart for the 200 pagers… But we love the blogs as well. Especially when they are blogging about the innovative model that UNITAID uses to provide drugs and diagnostics to 94 countries around the world.

Along for the trip with Philippe Douste-Blazy, Chairman UNITAID: Baratunde Thurston, Director of Digital for the Onion; Blogger Cheryl Contee; Lawyer-by-day/blogger-by night Jill Filipovic; UN Dispatch blogger Mark Leon Goldberg and globe-trotting strategist Felix Marquardt.

In a roller-coaster of a blog post, Cheryl Contee (pictured above at right) leads us on a detailed account of their journey to meet Cameroonian patients, community workers and other good-doers involved in the fight against HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria. There’s plenty of photos, both of “booty-shaking the African way” and play-by-play details of how UNITAID does an in country visit. According to Cheryl, it’s “Roll Deep…Go Hard…Get Out…” Read it for yourself. She’s summed up UNITAID perfectly:

UNITAID is a new (5 years old) and cutting-edge United Nations organization that is funded in part through micro-payments on airplane tickets. It’s the equivalent of one or 2 euros on economy class tix and a little more for business and first class tickets.

I encourage you to consider checking that box when you see it. UNITAID is doing some pretty amazing work. UNITAID is small — only 50 people and based out of Geneva. They have a lot of implementing partners — in other words, they concentrate on figuring out who are the best people on the ground to distribute drugs and manage treatments in communities. Folks they work with include UNICEF, the Clinton Foundation, the Gates Foundation, UNAIDS, The Global Fund and lots of other local groups. We met some of UNITAID’s local board members & partners while there and they were pretty amazing people.

Mark Leon Goldberg carried a clear intro about UNITAID in his first blog post from the visit:

UNITAID–if you are a reader of this blog, you’ve probably heard of it, but not quite sure what it does. Compared to groups like UNICEF or the World Health Organization, it is a relatively unknown organization, at least in the United States…

In 2007 UNITAID stepped in to back the development of cheap pediatric HIV/AIDS medicines with the promise of purchasing large quantities of these medicines for distribution in the developing world. Today, 8 out of 10 children on HIV treatment in the world are using treatments backed by UNITAID. That’s just one example of the kind of unglamorous but life saving work that UNITAID accomplishes.

Since its creation in 2006, UNITAID has invested $17 million in Cameroon alone. These funds are being used to purchase key life-saving products: test and treatments for HIV in both children and adults; treatment to cure someone of TB; and importantly, health interventions to prevent a mother transmitting HIV to her newborn baby. The numbers are impressive, but it’s the stories that matter.

In another post, Mark Leon Goldberg tells the story of an HIV-positive woman he met, who was given treatment to give birth to an HIV-negative baby. But she stopped her treatment after giving birth, causing her to develop resistance. Now, the only way she can continue living a healthy life is with powerful yet prohibitively expensive “second line” drugs:

This is where UNITAID comes in. One of the reasons the costs of second and third line treatments are so high is that the drug manufactures hold expensive patents on the drugs. On the one hand, this is reasonable enough: drug manufacturers invest a great deal into R&D and deserve a decent return on their investment. On the other hand, if costs don’t come down, a several thousand people living with HIV who require second line treatment will not be able to access it.

UNITAID’s brand new “patent pool” seeks to bridge the moral imperative to provide low cost drugs to patients and drug companies’ need to see a return on their investments. Drug companies who participate in the patent pool hand over their patents over to UNITAID, which makes those patents available to generic drug manufacturers.The pool was officially launched last month when Gilead Sciences turned four HIV drug patents over to UNITAID. They need other major drug manufacturers like GlaxoSmithKline and Johnson and Johnson to get on board if it is going to really work.

When you give to MASSIVEGOOD through our travel partners in the US, your donation goes to UNITAID. Cheryl ended her post with an inspiring call to action:

This is where UNITAID doesn’t believe in waiting or hoping. They do their biz and get to steppin’. They’re about action and if they can put themselves out of business through eradicating disease, I think they would do it. But for now, there’s plenty to do and no time to waste. People’s lives are on the line and through UNITAID, there’s something we can all do to help each other. Make sure to check that donation box to UNICEF when buying that plane ticket once it’s available. For every dollar they get from you, they can treat a couple of sick people. Small actions can make a difference.

Have a look at Felix Marquardt’s account here and Jill Filipovic’s post on her experience.

The UNITAID bloggers:

Felix Marquardt, Mark Leon Goldberg, Jill Filipovic, Baratunde Thurston and Cheryl Contee, Photo Credit: Felix Marquardt