The pandemic readiness fund is short on cash. It's not the only issue.

The well-intentioned — although awkwardly named — Financial Intermediary Fund for Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness and Response is facing significant early hurdles as it gets down to work. The overarching concern is that it is underfunded, and not just by a little. Donors have given just $1.4 billion of the $10.5 billion that World Health Organization and World Bank estimate is required on an annual basis. “Where are contributions going to come from?” asked Peter Baker, a policy fellow and assistant director at the Center for Global Development, during a panel discussion Tuesday at the Future of Development Finance event, which Devex hosted in London. That’s an unanswered question in an era of tightening belts. “Most aid budgets are not growing. … There is no obvious source of expanding global health money,” he said. Housed at the World Bank but independently run, the financial intermediary fund, or FIF, is effectively a trust fund that pools public and private money to prevent, prepare for, and respond to future pandemics. “Will money begin to talk?” --— Peter Baker, policy fellow and assistant director, Center for Global Development Baker raised the point that FIF was meant to generate “additionality”, meaning that donors would set aside new money for the fund apart from their general foreign aid spending. However, there is a “temptation” for high-income governments to utilize existing budgets, he warned. In the opening panel of Tuesday’s event, Mark Malloch-Brown warned that the war in Ukraine is prompting governments to reallocate money from their foreign aid budgets — which takes funding away from things such as FIF. “It's a very bad moment for development finance, including for the $10.5 billion, and we’ve both got to restore the political will and make people realize that these problems are shared problems,” said the president of the Open Society Foundations. “We have to recover that message and sense of will and momentum.” Moreover, the global nature of pandemics ends up incentivizing donors to use foreign aid to serve their own interests. “Pandemic preparedness is hugely beneficial to high-income countries as well as low-income countries,” Baker noted later during the panel. FIF has a governance board that is comprised of both donor and recipient governments, along with a couple of civil society members. But Baker cautioned that it still remains to be seen who gets to make the decisions. “Will money begin to talk?” he asked. “It’s not clear what the main priorities are and how it’s going to develop criteria to make those decisions,” he said. This includes choosing countries and projects for investment. The fund also still lacks KPIs telling us whether it is actually making progress on its goals. Obviously, who gets to make the decisions will also shape the prioritization. Will it be bed nets or surveillance networks? With the budget so tight, this could become a contentious area. Baker said a key for success is that all governments prioritize pandemic preparedness and prevention. This means FIF needs to “start turning its perspective a little but on its head,” including by helping countries build up health systems, in a way that creates a better global system, rather than disjointed projects.