The Gates Foundation Reboots Its Global Health Initiative

Bill and Melinda Gates are rebooting their polio-fighting efforts in AfricaBill Gates is a winner, accustomed to using modern technology to solve problems and improve people’s lives.

Since retiring as CEO of Microsoft, Bill and Melinda have focused on multiple initiatives, winning some and not making progress in others. In the war on polio, the Gates Foundation thought it had the upper hand, as a major donor of nearly 10% of the dollars devoted to eradicating polio worldwide.

This week the Gates Foundation will unveil an entirely new approach to fighting polio. Bill and Melinda have no chocie. When it comes to the war on polio, the problem is like Afghanistan.

The American is losing.

Trying to reach all the children in a community, health workers in Nigeria note when a vaccination is complete. Bill and Melinda Gates FoundationPolio is spreading again in Africa, after the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation has poured in $700 million to fight it.

Polio’s spreading in countries where the Gates global health brigade believed they had stopped it cold, evading a two-decade-long, $8.2 billion effort to kill it off.

Results-oriented, bottom-line-focused big philanthropy donors prefer curing a specific disease. With failure not a long-term strategy in his DNA, Bill Gates has asked World Health Officials “now what?”

Vaccinators squeezed drops of polio vaccine into the mouths of children in Manababba. Bill and Melinda Gates FoundationThe recalibrated campaign could shape global health strategy for decades and boost fights against other diseases. It will continue its focus on specific diseases in developing countries like polio and malaria. But it will also assume a strong focus on improving health-related conditions overall in impoverished nations.

The Wall Street Journal describes this change in direction as a major shift in global health strategy. Bill Gates is also going local. Nigeria is home to half the world’s 1,600 polio cases and exports the disease to other countries. While the total number of cases seems small, the multiplier effect could propogate a new global crisis in a disease thought nearly eradicated.

In 2003, Islamic leaders in northern Nigeria spread rumors that polio vaccines sterilized Muslim girls. Leaders halted vaccinations, allowing the virus to spread. The WHO said the virus eventually infected 20 countries. Travelling in Africa last summer, Gates was meeting with the sultan of Nigeria and local governors in an attempt to deal with the anti-vaccination directives of Muslim leaders, knowing that the first case of polio in 20 years was announced in Uganda.

Polio spreads through water contaminated by human feces. Here residents fathered water at the main well in the Manababba area of Sokoto. Bill and Melinda Gates FoundationThe Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will announce their new health strategy this week. But there are problems in a polio-fighting effort that’s now $1.4 billion short of its financial goals, with Gates saying he cannot make up the difference. The lack of progress — or worries about a total reversal of polio-fighting efforts in Africa — will surely impact cautious philanthropists unwilling to pick up the slack.

One of the hallmarks of financially-successful philanthropists like Bill Gates is his ability to control the environment in which he operates. Learning that local authorities has banned polio vaccinations with misinformed, bad science must have caused Bill Gates to have a triple scotch.

It seems that the new Gates Foundation initiative will operate with some of the learnings of the Tostan Foundation, working throughout Africa on female genital cutting. Most of Tostan’s considerable success has come by working one village at a time, educating and encouraging the locals to embrace change and agree together to accept new customs that replace long-accepted ones that work against their overall health quality.

From the results-oriented Western perspective, propelled by grave concerns that time is running out to curb the devastation of infectious disease, the situation is genuinely frustrating. Curing polio is not an example of America’s global cultural imperialism. And yet, it seems that the Bill and Melinda Gates polio-fighting initiative could succumb to just those false rumors.

We know that international diplomacy is frustratingly complex. Here we have an example of a science-based, life-saving global health initiative under a total revamp at a point when it believed it had the upper hand over the dreaded polio disease.

Read about Tostan’s successful efforts in female genital cutting in Africa.  Original WSJ article.