The Task Force for Global Health is one of the world’s largest health NGOs, receiving most of its support in the form of in-kind donations. But over the past two years, those donations have taken a billion-dollar hit from COVID-19.
In the fiscal year ending in August 2019, The Task Force received in-kind donations worth more than $2.5 billion — chiefly drugs to combat neglected tropical diseases, or NTDs. But those donations fell in value to about $847 million in fiscal 2020 and then rebounded slightly to $961 million in fiscal 2021 — still a drop of more than 60% from 2019.
Its largest donors are pharmaceutical giants Pfizer, which in the last fiscal year provided $646 million worth of Zithromax to combat trachoma, and Merck, which donated $315 million worth of Mectizan to fight river blindness, according to the task force. But it also works on many other programs, including a relatively new partnership with Novartis to tackle leprosy, a disease that still sees hundreds of thousands of new cases each year.