In-Depth Archive

Over the past decade, the amount of money flowing into developing countries to address health issues has grown at an incredible rate. According to one authoritative estimate, the total annual value of money and goods donated to global health from all sources, public and private, has risen from less than $8 billion in 1995 to almost $27 billion in 2010 — with most of that increase occurring since 2002. Game-changing new organizations have been created during this period, from radically different kinds of private philanthropies, such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has made more than $13 billion […]

Through their foundations and personal-diplomacy efforts, Bill Gates and Bill Clinton are changing how the international community addresses global health concerns. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is the world’s wealthiest philanthropy, and it has used its wealth to help set the governance agenda for global health. The William J. Clinton Foundation has used the former president’s stature to negotiate agreements between governments and pharmaceutical companies that had previously stymied international trade negotiations for years. The prominence of these two foundations raises a host of issues about the role of private actors in international governance, policy accountability within the international […]

At the closing ceremonies of the International AIDS Conference in Vienna this year, U.S. President Barack Obama pledged to redouble U.S. efforts to fight HIV and AIDS through his Global Health Initiative, notwithstanding hard times in the wake of the global recession. Despite this verbal commitment, many AIDS activists were not satisfied and would later protest, particularly before the midterm U.S. congressional elections, that the U.S. was not spending enough on AIDS overseas. A closer look at the Global Health Initiative budget reveals that these concerns may be justified. While AIDS funding has grown 4 percent from FY2010 to FY2011 […]