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Andrew Witty, the CEO of GlaxoSmithKline, and Justin
Forsyth,
executive director of Save the Children UK, visit with women
in
Wajir, Kenya.
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United Nations negotiations don’t have
a great reputation. Too often they’re perceived as little more than a forum for
special advisers to ruthlessly horse-trade their government’s pet policies.
But while the process of UN
negotiations can be challenging, we cannot underestimate the power of hard-won
consensus.
Last week, for example, the UN
published its annual
statistics on child mortality around the world, revealing that the
number of children dying every year has almost halved – down from 12 million in
1990 to 6.6 million in 2012. This historic progress can be partly attributed to
the energy and focus generated by the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).
These goals, signed into being in 2000, provided a road map for how all
countries could collaborate on the future of development. That agreement,
however, expires in 2015.
As global leaders congregate in
New York this week to take stock of this progress in the MDGs and to
try to shape the ambition for the next 15 years, they should recognise the
unprecedented opportunity that they face: Ending preventable child deaths, a
goal that is now within our grasp.
But this will only be achieved by bold
and decisive action from the international development community and national
governments to move beyond business as usual in the global fight against
poverty. This includes addressing one of the gaps in the MDGs: harnessing the
power of the private sector.
Business can be a key driver of
development – stimulating inclusive growth and creating decent jobs; enhancing
access to essential services; developing innovations to address human and
sustainable development challenges; as well as paying appropriate taxes.
Improved infrastructure, a more skilled workforce and a more prosperous society
also benefit business in the long-term, creating a virtuous circle.
With the private sector at the table
this time round, there is the appetite to explore potentially transformative
new business models, with businesses aligning their corporate objectives
with the development of products, services and value chain practices that
contribute to poverty reduction and human well-being.
While the broad concept of businesses
addressing social problems is not new, the setting of explicit social impact
targets tied to core business is. If properly interrogated, this could be
game-changing.
Creating unusual partnerships is the
key to unlocking these new business models. The strategic
partnership between Save the Children and GlaxoSmithKline pushes
both organisations outside of our comfort zones and prompts innovative
behaviours in a bid to help to save one million children’s lives.
For instance, with Save the Children
sitting on GSK’s new pediatric research and development board, we expect to see
the reformulation of the antiseptic chlorhexidine in a GSK mouthwash so it can
be used to clean the umbilical cord stump of newborns to prevent serious
infection, a major cause of newborn death in poor countries.
Perhaps even more challenging to our
existing organisational cultures and practices, there is a determination to use
our combined voices to improve health care access for the poorest, through
joint advocacy on the expansion of essential care.
That an NGO and a pharmaceutical
company can agree to support universal health coverage within the agreement
that succeeds the MDGs – the Post 2015 framework – might seem strange to some
people.
But without directly addressing the
potentially contentious issues, the full promise of these partnerships will not
be reached. Through dialogue we are now clear that our actions should promote
investment in public health services as these are cost-effective and more
likely to serve the poor.
Governments and donors may be keen to
invest resources in the private sector; but this should only be contemplated
where good evidence shows that it will benefit the poorest, either directly or
by freeing up public resources.
We agree that the for-profit private
sector has an important role in health service delivery. The development and
production of medicines, vaccines, diagnostics and equipment, especially when
tailored to the needs of developing countries, is something for which the world
relies on the private sector.
Increasingly there is interest and
enthusiasm for using private sector innovations to help improve health service
delivery. We recognise that a great deal of healthcare is currently provided by
the private sector, whether it is the high-quality services which are usually
only available to the better-off or the unofficial services that are used by
the poor when public services are inadequate or non-existent.
It is a massive challenge to ensure
that this capacity is of sufficient quality, well-regulated by governments and
integrated into state health systems so that they can be available, equitably,
to those that need healthcare most. Private sector efforts should complement,
not compete with, public efforts.
Through these tough conversations
about the practical role of different partners in the delivery of the post-2015
framework, we can achieve more than we could by acting alone or in silos.
Talk of public-private partnerships
within the framework is not a proxy for unfettered access to new markets for
untried or untested new products. The contrasting skills, expertise and
purposes of partners are critical in getting the right checks and balance in
place.
So when Save the Children and GSK aim
to harness the latter’s R&D to produce a new low-cost nutrition product, we
do so with a focus on the intended beneficiaries. We must constantly check who
will profit, how the materials will be sourced, what the impact will be on the
local market, and where the regulatory mechanisms or enforcement capacities
that protect consumers against exploitation should sit.
While we don’t claim to have all the
answers, we are trying move beyond simple commitments to a debate that tries to
identify then incentivise the behaviors and practices - corporate, NGO, and
governmental - which will have the greatest impact over the next 15 years.
While high level principles are
crucial, this practical, rubber hits the road discussion has the potential for
making one element of the complex UN negotiations tangible.
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