Four years after its launch, the WHO Foundation has funneled $24 million to the World Health Organization. It aims to expand the donor base, reduce the administrative work, and align funding with WHO’s priorities.
It started with a call with Prince Harry and ended with a multimillion-dollar donation to the World Health Organization’s health response in Ukraine from a wealth management company.
The WHO Foundation arranged the call with the U.S.-based ICONIQ Impact, which also included WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus and his deputy, Mike Ryan. And the prince was there to help seal the deal.
That’s what the WHO Foundation says it brings to the table — to serve as a convener to reap money from philanthropic organizations, companies, corporate foundations, and the general public for a United Nations agency that has long struggled with sustainable financing.
In the exclusive interview, Anil Soni, the Chief Executive Officer at the foundation, says that his goal is to engage in more “big bet philanthropy” and impact investing in the coming years, bringing more partners on board to tackle global challenges.
WHO has long struggled to secure flexible funding for its operations, which limits the agency’s ability to allocate resources to the most pressing global health priorities. While the private sector isn’t known for bringing in fully flexible funds — that’s the role country membership dues play — the WHO Foundation can work with philanthropic organizations, companies, and corporate foundations that might still want some control over where their money goes but are willing to align their giving with WHO’s activities.
The foundation also takes over the often time-consuming role of writing reports and maintaining donor relationships, freeing up WHO’s staff time to get back to the business of responding to global health needs. The agency must write more than 3,000 reports to donors each year.
Excerpts:
How would you present your organization in a few words? What entails your position? What is your goal?
The WHO Foundation is a Swiss foundation affiliated with the World Health Organization (WHO) that mobilizes more resources from the private sector to achieve WHO’s mission of Health for All. Our job is to reimagine and reshape how people and companies contribute to global health by catalyzing high-impact solutions and by connecting change-makers.
Among the concentration of actors in Geneva (IOs, NGOs, permanent missions, academia, and the private sector), who do you work with and how?
The WHO Foundation believes that by coming together, organizations working towards health equity can be more effective. We are facing a world with ever greater challenges and demands on resources. This creates the risk of competition, when, in fact, collaboration allows organizations to be more efficient and effective at raising resources. The WHO, for example, is one piece of the puzzle with national governments and other international and nonprofit organizations when it comes to eliminating a disease. We help define those collective outcomes and complementary roles to better mobilize resources and enable impact.
What are the strengths and weaknesses of Geneva with regards to the development of your activity?
Geneva is unique in the world for its concentration of global health leaders and organizations, all working towards a common vision of health access as a human right. Another strength is that it is a home to the United Nations, which brings together the nations of the world. A challenge in Geneva is the distance from the communities most affected by injustice and poverty; and the very same communities who are on the front lines of the solutions that international organizations must support. Local leaders around the planet must not be distant beneficiaries; but close partners. Those of us who work in Geneva must make every effort to listen to their voices and support their efforts.
What do you think global governance should look like 20 or 30 years from now?
Global governance today remains a post-colonial architecture shaped in the wake of the world wars of the last century. It concentrates power in the hands of a limited number of countries and in the participation of governments, not civil society. Though this is changing, with some peer organizations in Geneva making important strides in that direction, the United Nations’ own Secretary-General has made clear that reform is urgent. Such reform should distribute power to more countries and communities.
What question would you like to have been asked? And what keeps you “awake at night”?
I am the father of two young children, and what keeps me up at night is the urgency and magnitude of the challenges we face to make a better world for them. Climate change is changing the face of the planet, and is a product of how people and companies have acted in my lifetime. We owe it to our children – and to the communities who have contributed the least to carbon emissions but are being most affected – to correct for our own actions. That is what equity means to me: repair. Inequity is a product of injustice. And all of us can be change agents on behalf of justice. That’s the question I always want to be asked and that I ask for others: how do we make this mission more personal, so that we are acting not out of charity to help others, but from a deep understanding of interdependence and common humanity.
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