Sanjay Suri
LONDON, Mar 9 2006 (IPS) – The decision by Brazil to join an innovative immunisation programme can have long-term health benefits, and more-long term consequences for financing development.
Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva announced in London Thursday that Brazil will contribute 20 million dollars over 20 years to the International Finance Facility for Immunisation (IFFIm).
Brazil joins six European nations France, Italy, Norway, Spain, Sweden and Britain in committing funds to the innovative financing mechanism.
IFFIm was introduced to provide funding for new and under-used vaccines for treatment of conditions such as hepatitis and yellow fever. The global programme caught particular attention because it was held up as a prototype of funding under the International Finance Facility (IFF) proposed by British finance minister Gordon Brown.
The IFF proposes to front-load aid. This means that governments use a long-term budget to pay out money early. Money will be raised through bonds against donor commitments to speed up money availability, in effect combining government aid with the market.
In effect it is like taking out a mortgage, Jane-Pierre Lecalvez from the GAVI Alliance (formerly the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation) told IPS on phone from Geneva. The money needed is made immediately available, and repaid later.
The model has worked very well for IFFIm, Lecalvez said. We have been able to save 1.7 million lives in a few years. Once we have our targeted 4 billion dollars, we will be able to save five million children and five million adults.
The commitment announced by Brazil is relatively small but significant, Lecalvez said. It shows that emerging economies are taking development seriously, also from the funding standpoint.
Brazil has been keen to develop a vaccine to support this programme, Lecalvez said. Brazil is very keen to reach every child in Brazil with a vaccination programme. This shows that countries like Brazil are taking development issues in their own hands, and making a contribution, and not just working with donors.
And IFFIm shows that innovative financing for development really works, he said. It shows a need to look beyond all the old models such as tied aid.
Under IFFIm governments are committed to a funding from 2006 to 2025, but the money would actually be disbursed over a ten-year period. This speeding up of the money will save millions of lives, Lecalvez said.
GAVI works as an international health partnership that includes the United Nations Children s Fund (Unicef), the World Health Organisation, the World Bank, the Bill Melinda Gates Foundation, and representatives of the vaccine industry in both industrialised and developing countries.
President Lula who is visiting London said in a statement: Brazil and the UK understand that our future depends on victory in the struggle against social inequality, and on the elimination of hunger and poverty. To this effect, Brazil has decided to join the British initiative of creating an International Finance Facility for Immunisation, and will be contributing 20 million dollars over 20 years.
With new funding from IFFIm, GAVI announced it will work with its partners to scale up their efforts to reach more children with life- saving vaccines, while providing significant new support to strengthen health systems.
The design of this innovative financing mechanism is particularly exciting because it allows capital to flow directly from the markets to a place where it can have a tremendous impact on the lives of the world s poor, Alan Gillespie, chairman of the Ulster Bank Group and chair of the IFFIm board said in a statement. Instead of losing excess liquidity in the capital markets to profit-making entities, we are harnessing some of it for development.
Dr. Ciro de Quadros, president of the Albert B. Sabin Vaccine Institute in Washington DC, and chairman of GAVI s independent review committee, said Brazil is announcing its support for IFFIm the same week that it introduces one of two new rotavirus vaccines.
This year the government will immunise three million newborns against the disease that causes dehydrating diarrhoea and kills 500,000 children globally every year, de Quadros said.
As a large buyer of vaccines, GAVI said in a statement it has stimulated new market interest in producing vaccines. While a few years ago there was only one manufacturer of the combined Diphtheria-Tetanus-Pertussis- Hepatitis B vaccine, 11 companies have submitted bids to begin supplying the vaccine in 2006.
The statement from GAVI says its efforts are critical to achieving the Millennium Development Goal on child health, which calls for reducing childhood mortality by two-thirds by 2015. Of the more than 10 million children who die before reaching their fifth birthday every year, 2.5 million die from diseases that could be prevented with currently available or new vaccines.
