Transcript
DAVID DE FERRANTI: We and the world start with a funding gap for health that has been variously estimated, but there is one thing that is agreement on, and that is that it is big. Bill Gates has said that if the shortfall in world funding is about $50 billion per year to reach the Millennium Development Goals for health as is commonly suggested, that even with his resources plus Warren Buffett's, all of that money would only fill the gap for 18 months and then everyone would be right back to the same problem again. So even substantial resources are not substantial enough.
The Global Fund raised and committed $7 billion from 2002 to 2007 and has received total pledges of $9.8 billion through 2008. And while these are not small amounts of money, that amount in the global fund is nowhere the estimated need of $15 billion per just for the three diseases that concern it, and I know that the Global Fund is very aware of these issues.
Bottom line, it will take financial cleverness and a long-term commitment of substantial new funds to close these gaps, and therefore we have not only a financial gap, but we have an ingenuity gap. We need to be ingenious. And there are ideas that are recently launched that are showing us some possibilities. The International Finance Facility for Immunizations, IFFI, and the Advanced Market Commitment, the AMC for New Drugs, recently launched, and the French Airline, these are all new undertakings, relatively new, trying to stretch the available dollars so that they can have a more beneficial impact for health. And now today we discuss another idea, the Global Fund Debt Conversion, and I hope that it will not only find ideas that are important for the financing gap and the ingenuity gap, but also improve or solve our knowledge gap.
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