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Dagfinn Høybråten
Board Chair of the GAVI Alliance
Friday
27 Jan
2012
The immunisation of children is an investment with guaranteed results: child survival. And once you know that the investment will double if put toward such a principled cause, how could you not contribute?
Leaders from the business world and civil society were presented with this compelling case at a breakfast meeting in Davos this week. It was a joy for me as Chair of the GAVI Alliance to moderate the event.
Davos is site of the World Economic Forum, a beautiful place framed by a bleak economic environment. The 2012 WEF annual meeting is devoted to finding bold ideas, personal courage and new models to reshape the global economy and improve rather than cap human potential. That’s also what the GAVI Alliance was demonstrating at the breakfast meeting.
GAVI, in fact, was launched in January 2000 at WEF in Davos. Twelve years later, the bold ideas and courage that formed our Alliance has become a dynamic success story. It stands as a light in a rather dark state of the world.
Its newest programme is the Gavi Matching Fund. Through it at our breakfast, Bill Gates and British International Development Secretary Andrew Mitchell offered the Matching Fund as a perfect investment for the leaders around the board room table: for every pound given to this GAVI programme by organisations and businesses in the United Kingdom, the British Government will give another.
For every dollar that is given by similar enterprises in other parts of the world, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will give the same.
Thus, at the breakfast meeting in Davos, the GAVI Matching Fund attracted another US$ 9 million to immunise the children of the world, bringing the total to US$ 38 million dollars in just a handful of months.
From the world of organ transplant, we know that a “perfect match” means that an organ is perfectly compatible for the recipient, saving life in a highly sustainable way. This is also the case with GAVI, an alliance that is pooling the demand for vaccines from lower income countries in order to deliver them in a secure, low-cost way.
In the case of the Matching Fund, GAVI now is matching the best experience and knowledge from the private and public sectors to develop an innovative financial solution. GAVI is matching those around the boardroom those who can make a sustainable difference in global immunisation. And this leads to the most important match of all: the vaccine and the child, protecting life, enhancing healthy populations and building nations.
For me, this is a perfect match. It saves life in the most sustainable way. That is why I went to Davos. That is why I devote much of my time to the GAVI mission.