An initiative aimed at encouraging independent European funding foundations to play a more active part in worldwide health issues was launched last week, spearheaded by the publication of a new report from the European Foundation Centre.
The centre is an independent international association that links and underpins the work of more than 200 foundations and corporate funders, which between them are involved in some 350 philanthropic community initiatives.
At the launch of the new report in Brussels last week John Owen, who chairs the centre's network initiative on global health, urged European foundations to develop their role as “philanthropic venture capitalists.”
“Many foundations already commit 5% of their resources to global and development initiatives outside Europe,” he said. What the new initiative was seeking to do was to inform them and spur them to act to improve health.
They could do this in a variety of different ways, Dr Owen suggested, from investing directly in research and innovation (as some high profile US foundations do) to supporting existing global health initiatives and fostering coordination among established health networks, professional groups, European institutions, and non-governmental associations.
Welcoming the publication of the report as a “timely initiative,” Robert Madelin, director general of the European Commission's health and consumer safety directorate, supported the centre's view that the European Union should do more to improve health outside as well as inside Europe and that to achieve this it needed to develop a coherent global health strategy.
He pointed to one of several incongruities within the EU with respect to health: the fact that it is a big manufacturing base for tobacco products. Debates on health needed to be extended outside the health sector, he said, to include colleagues in trade, security, and agriculture.
The need to “mainstream” health in all areas of EU policy has been the key priority of the presidency of the EU while it has been under Finnish control. Anna Ehrnrooth, health attaché to Finland's permanent representation in Brussels, said: “Europe can and should become a world leader in public health,” she said.
Further information about the European Foundation Centre and copies of European Perspectives on Global Health: A Policy Glossary may be obtained from www.efc.be.