What has the Gates Foundation done for global health?
28th May 2009; 18:00
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RSA Event with The Lancet
The Gates Foundation has rapidly become one of the biggest players in global health.
Last year Bill Gates gave up being CEO of Microsoft to work full time at his Foundation, which has an endowment of $60 billion (almost a quarter of that of the entire UN system) and has a legal requirement to spend $3 billion on global health every year.
While this philanthropic endeavour is laudable, the massive budget and scale of the Foundation have resulted in a complete change of the global health landscape, agenda and approach, and concerns have been raised over a perceived lack of accountability, a focus on high-tech solutions and particular funding favourites.
Join our expert speakers to assess the role of the Gates Foundation in global public health and to determine whether the Gates Foundation might be doing more harm than good, or whether the Foundation and private philanthropy in general offers a new way forward for global health?
Speakers:
Dave McCoy, RSA trustee and managing editor of the Global Health Watch, an alternative world health report; senior clinical associate in global health and development at the University College London and author of a Lancet paper that looks at the grants given out by the Foundation over the past few years.
Matthew Bishop, business editor at The Economist and author of Philanthrocapitalism: how the rich can save the world (Bloomsbury, 2008).
Chair: Richard Horton, editor, The Lancet
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