Giving Compass' Take:

• Unitaid is a Geneva-based organization that is hoping to move away from the siloed approach to global health development and instead engage with the private sector,  government stakeholders and donors to work in partnerships that will drive innovation. 

• What are potential pitfalls with depending on public-private partnerships?  What lessons can we learn from the past with these types of collaborations in global development? 

• Read about the plea for the World Bank to take action against public-private partnerships. 

The global health community is increasingly moving away from a siloed approach — favored in the height of the battle against HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria — toward a more integrated methodology in the spirit of the Sustainable Development Goals.

Unitaid, a Geneva-based organization that invests in new ways to prevent, diagnose, and treat the three pandemics, is one of the actors leading this paradigm shift alongside innovators from the private sector, governments, and donors.

Sanne Fournier-Wendes, senior adviser to Unitaid’s executive director, explained to Devex how the organization is engaging with the private sector to push forward an integrated approach to global health.

As part of a more integrated approach to global health, Unitaid is investing in child fever management and multiplatform diagnostics — devices that can be used to screen various diseases. Why is it critical to support innovators in these areas at this moment in time? 

Fever management in children under 5 is an under prioritized area which falls through the cracks of many different disease areas. And, over the last 15 years, the global health community has responded in a very siloed way — a given program would only look at malaria, HIV or tuberculosis.

For years, manufacturers were faced with that barrier. For instance, they might come up with a TB diagnostic system that could also be applied to HCV — hepatitis C virus — but they would be told: “Sorry, we cannot support this because our program is only looking at TB.”

How are you engaging or planning to engage with the private sector to catalyze innovation, particularly in child fever management?

We recently launched a call for proposals to diagnose severe disease in children through devices that can, for example, identify those who need oxygen therapy. These innovations are being developed by the private sector — so we engage with them at different levels.

Read the full article about global health by Gloria Pallares at Devex International Development