WHO raises nearly $700M, but global health funding worries persist

Governments, philanthropies, and companies pledged nearly $700 million to the World Health Organization during an investment event at this week’s World Health Summit in Berlin, Germany. The funding, in support of WHO’s first investment round, was capped by co-host Germany’s pledge of $260 million in new voluntary funding. “Tonight we have taken a huge step toward mobilizing the resources we need to implement” the organization’s four-year plan starting in 2025, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told the audience. That strategy calls for actions, including delivering vaccinations and strengthening health workforces, designed to save 40 million lives. The WHO fundraiser, which also had Norway and France as hosts, was the featured event in a conference that has seen multiple asks for resources. That includes from organizations like Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, even as speaker after speaker has acknowledged that funds for global health are slipping. “After decades of expanding, funding for global health is now contracting,” Bill Gates, the billionaire head of the Gates Foundation, warned during the pledging session. “That really challenges us, and we really need to make the case that ideally, over time, as there’s flexibility, these budgets go back to the increases we saw before.” His organization has so far pledged $42 million to WHO’s investment round, part of the more than $1 billion in pledges a spokesperson told Devex the agency has received so far. However, ahead of the Berlin event, WHO had reported $2.2 billion in projected funding toward its $7.1 billion financing requirement. The spokesperson said, “in the events, donors might reference commitments made in the past or which are not going toward the base budget.” That still leaves WHO short of the $11.1 billion it is attempting to raise in this investment round to cover its base budget for the period between 2025 and 2028. However, WHO expects to draw around $4 billion of that total from assessed contributions of its member states. WHO launched its investment round at the 77th World Health Assembly in May, looking to secure stability and break free from a funding model that relied on often unpredictable, project-specific funds. “For far too long, the WHO has operated with unpredictable, inflexible, unsustainable funding that has prevented us from delivering the long-term support that countries need,” Tedros said in Berlin. The pledging event this week followed similar initiatives in the Southeast Asia region and Africa. After committing $87,200 to WHO, Montenegro’s Prime Minister Milojko Spajić announced he would also host a high-level meeting to raise additional funds from the Balkan states. The investment round is scheduled to culminate in a pledging ceremony on the sidelines of the Group of 20 largest economies’ meeting in Brazil next month. Norway Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre announced a nearly $94 million donation over the next four years, pending parliamentary approval. He did not specify how much of that total was an assessed contribution and how much was an additional voluntary donation to WHO. “The World Health Organization is more important than ever,” Støre said in a video announcement of the pledge. He called the agency the “leading normative and technical organization on global public health.” Officials from France, the event’s other host, said they would announce a contribution by mid-December. Representatives from the United Kingdom and Spain also said they would announce their contributions later this year. WHO officials weren’t the only ones who arrived in Berlin looking for funding. Gavi and the Global Fund co-hosted a panel on Sunday in which the moderator explicitly asked the two organizations to make their case to funders. Gavi is already in the midst of a replenishment round, with a goal of raising $9 billion. The Global Fund will start its own replenishment next year. “The world has never been in this situation,” Gavi CEO Sania Nishtar acknowledged at the start of the panel. “Donors have competing priorities and fiscal restraints.” Even as she emphasized the lives and money that vaccines can save by preventing illness, Nishtar also pointed out how Gavi is working to conserve resources by working in closer collaboration with the Global Fund. “There is a very significant and a very serious desire to cooperate, to coordinate, to make sure we minimize duplication on the ground,” she said. The two multinationals are also trying to combine back-office efforts both at their Geneva headquarters and in other countries to save funds, as well. For his part, Global Fund Executive Director Peter Sands acknowledged the need to innovate in order to accelerate advances and curb spending. But even as he decried efforts to pit organizations scrambling for money against each other, he also pointed out the benefits of donating to the Global Fund, which offers a “kind of nimbleness and ability to do things that are difficult to do if you are a member-state organization.” Niels Annen, the parliamentary state secretary for Germany’s Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development, sat on the panel and joked that it felt like the two organizations were pitching directly to him. Even as he lauded their impact and pushed back against calls from within Germany to curb spending on international efforts, he also made clear that there is probably not going to be enough money from traditional donors to go around. He pointed to the need for more private capital if all of these organizations and agencies are going to reach their fundraising goals. “Look at the health sector, look at the current needs for humanitarian aid and the ongoing conflict in the world. Look at the need for climate financing,” Annen said. “If you put everything together, it’s impossible to address all these challenges with government money.” Update, Oct. 16, 2024: This article has been updated to clarify that WHO has received more than $1 billion in pledges as part of its investment round.