After Charles Kenny agreed with me that public-health aid should be run through governments rather than non-governmental organizations acting largely independently, I had a simple question for him. If I want to give money to a public-health charity, what’s the best way of making sure that my money is being spent in alignment with the local government’s priorities?

So let me make my own suggestion: DNDI, the Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative.

DNDI is not a government; Rachel Cohen, the executive director of DNDI for North America, calls it “a nonprofit R&D organization”. But compared to most non-profits, it has very strong ties to governments in the countries it works in, as well as to the World Health Organization.

The basic idea behind DNDI is leverage – that dream of much philanthropy. DNDI researches neglected diseases, and tries to find cures which are suited to often-harsh field conditions where technologies like refrigeration, which many western researchers tend to take for granted, can be hard to find.

Read the full article by Felix Salmon about neglected diseases from Cause & Effect