Launch of Rockefeller Foundation Transforming Health Systems Initiative
Remarks as prepared for Judith Rodin
Nairobi, Kenya
I’m thrilled to return to Nairobi – and Kenya – a crucial center of Rockefeller Foundation activity for almost a century. Our history in East Africa commenced with a 1913 campaign to control yellow fever and has since evolved to include work bolstering food security, most recently as a founder and co-funder of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA); helping smallholder farmers cope with the imminent and worsening consequences of the climate crisis; addressing 21st century urban challenges with innovations in planning, finance, governance, and infrastructure; and creating disease surveillance networks to identify potential pandemic risks, project possible transmission routes, and marshal solutions for prevention and treatment, which is especially important as H1N1 hits Kenya. We’ve had an office here in Nairobi since 1966 and committed close to $400 million in grants that directly impact this region, during the last decade alone.
Today, the Rockefeller Foundation supports efforts, around the world, which ensure that globalization’s benefits are more widely shared and its burdens more robustly, resiliently weathered. We call this “Smart Globalization.” It means connecting more people in more places with ideas and innovations, technologies and techniques, services and solutions to build better futures, while strengthening their ability to survive and adapt in the face of hardships, whether environmental, manmade, or both.
One major component of this endeavor emerges from the Foundation’s legacy of shaping innovations in health, many of which have directly benefited the diverse peoples of East Africa – from establishing and spreading of the fields of public health to developing a Nobel Prize-winning vaccine for yellow fever, training hundreds of “Rocky Doc’s,” scientists, researchers, physicians, and scholars, pioneering HIV/AIDS treatments, and organizing a worldwide push for public-private partnerships that accelerate development of new drugs and vaccines.
In this context, we’re delighted to launch, here in Nairobi, the Rockefeller Foundation’s Transforming Health Systems Initiative, which will support a new generation of innovations on a new frontier, this time the transformation of health systems around the world.
While health spending has increased dramatically in many developing countries, peoples’ access to affordable, quality health services has not. In Sub-Saharan Africa, mortality rates for children under age five have decreased by only 15 percent since 1990, despite major new investments. This is a relatively low success rate compared to a decrease of more than 50 percent in Latin America and the Caribbean during the same period.
Furthermore, because costs continue climbing, care may grow too expensive for millions more families. A recent World Health Organization report estimates that, every year, inefficient and inadequate health systems lead 125 million people to spend nearly half their annual income on health care. Twenty-five million families fall back into poverty annually because of catastrophic health expenditures.
And even as the number of health care workers rises, their efforts may be rendered less effective if health systems supporting their efforts are not reorganized to maximize available human and financial resources.
We intend to address these and other issues by pursuing three major objectives:
- First, equipping governments with the technology, talent, tools, and training to become better health systems’ stewards – to improve health planning, financing, and delivery.
- Second, engaging the private sector in the search for innovations to provide and finance health services for the poor. Here, we’re testing approaches to integrate public and non-public resources in order to provide quality services with lower out-of-pocket costs.
- And third, expanding the use of interoperable information technology, or eHealth. With the arrival of fiber-optic cables in East Africa, the potential to leverage integrated information systems toward saving lives is dramatically accelerating. Imagine your mobile phone as your portal to health care. This is not science fiction; it’s already happening.
While vertical interventions – including revolutionary new drugs and treatments – remain crucially important, we must also ensure that they get to the people who most need them. We must break the bottlenecks that restrict access to quality services because no matter how powerful the drug, it won’t do any good if consumers can’t reach the doctor that prescribes it, the clinic that provides it, or pay the bill if they receive it.
This new initiative will tear down barriers preventing millions of people from accessing affordable, high-quality health services. And it will help ensure that advances in life-saving treatment can improve the lives of more people, in more places, more fully and fairly.
