Giving Compass' Take:

• The Global Financing Facility plans to invest in global health by working with local governments and healthcare facilities to allocate necessary funds and possibly finance health-related solutions and prevention plans. 

• Why is it important the GFF help empower governments to achieve their own health-specific goals and work in collaboration? 

• Learn about what you can do to make an impact on global health. 

The biggest lottery in life is, without a doubt, where you’re born.

So much is already predetermined from the moment you take your first breath: literacy rates in your country, your access to health care, malnutrition rates, even your life expectancy, or worse, your chances of infant mortality.

Where we’re born or what family we’re born into is completely out of our control.

The gap between those who are born with access to quality health care and those who are born in a place where infants may not live past 5 years old is significant — in fact, it’s a gap that requires $33.3 billion in order to close it.

This is where the Global Financing Facility (GFF) comes in. What is possibly the world’s largest effort to level that playing field attempts to provide others with a shot at a healthy life — or, at the very least, at surviving the first few years.

It provides financing that’s flexible for existing governments and institutions to empower themselves. It helps with the preparatory work and provides the technical assistance needed to determine the individual priorities that will help each country reach their specific health-related goals. The GFF works with ministries of finance and health in the respective countries to allocate existing and additional resources to wherever they are most needed — often to the frontlines of health care.

Read the full article about the Global Financing Facility by Diana Duong at Global Citizen