Washington, DC — Edward W. Scott, Jr. founded BEA Systems, a software company, in 1995 following a career in the technology industry with Sun Microsystems and Pyramid Technology. Before entering private business, he spent 17 years working in the U.S. government, most recently serving as Assistant Secretary of Transportation in the Carter Administration.
Since leaving active management of BEA, Scott has become involved in global development issues and philanthropy, founding the Center for Global Development in 2001 and co-founding Debt, Aid and Trade for Africa with Bill Gates and George Soros. Each of these organizations is dedicated to building public awareness about poverty and development in poor countries, with a particular focus on the HIV/Aids pandemic.
This month Scott launched Friends of the Global Fight, a U.S.-based organization designed to promote the work of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria. The Global Fund is a partnership among international organizations, governments, civil society groups and the private sector but gets most of its funding from national governments. Scott recently spoke to AllAfrica's Tamela Hultman about the purpose of the Global Fight.
There are so many groups already working on global health issues. Why do we need another one?
It was clear that the Global Fund to fight Aids, TB and Malaria did not have an office or outlet for timely, accurate and important information about work of the Global Fund in the U.S. Frequently, questions would come up at the White House or on the Hill from the media about the work of the Global Fund, and if they didn't know how to get hold of somebody in Geneva, there was no real source for the information. Occasionally, issues would come up which were controversial - recently there was this issue about the type of anti-malarial medicines that the Global Fund was using and in the normal course there wouldn't have been anybody to respond to that. That's what Friends does.
Friends in many ways acts as an arm of the Global Fund in the U.S. You might ask, 'Well, why doesn't the Global Fund just have an office here?' and the answer to that question is they don't have an office because their board has chosen to center all the support resources for the board in Geneva and to run a very thin overhead. So our role is to get the maximum amount of resources channeled toward the problems of solving the impact of those three diseases.
Why work with the Global Fund instead of other organizations?
The work is important because the Global Fund is fundamentally a funding agency. It channels money from the governments of the richer countries to the poorer countries so they can combat these diseases. The Global Fund has raised over $5 billion and it has distributed almost $350million - in 120 countries by the way - and the work is important because the money to sustain the Global Fund - at least a third of it comes from the U.S. The U.S. tends to be the leader. If the U.S. puts up its third, the EU is very likely to follow with its third, after which the other potential donors also participate. So keeping the U.S. public and the U.S. body politic engaged and supportive of the Global Fund is crucial to the short-term and long-term viability of the Fund which, of course, is crucial to the ability of poor countries to fight these diseases. And, as I think I mentioned, 120 countries received this money from the Global Fund, so we're talking about a huge issue.
After a life in business and software development, why become involved in this issue? Why does global health matter to you?
Everybody has to look inside themselves to decide what makes them do what they do. In my case, I felt like I was already involved in a number of related areas having to do with both development and the Aids pandemic. I was the founder and financier of the Center for Global Development, and I was one of three co- founders of Data - Debt, Aid and Trade for Africa - which is the organization for which Bono is the chief spokesman. Bill Gates, George Soros and I put up the resources required to start that. So I was already somewhat knowledgeable about the issues, and I saw this huge vacuum. it seemed to me that the Global Fund, although it relies principally on money from governments, really deserved and required the support of individuals, so individuals with means should come forward and provide that support. That's why I did it.
What do you say to people who think Aids is just another major problem we don't know how to do anything about?
There are two parts to the answer. The first is that it is a big problem. Not only is it a big problem, it's the biggest health problem the world has ever faced. It is bigger than the Black Death.
It's bigger than any health calamity that the world has ever contemplated. About 3 million people a year die of the disease. Maybe you've heard us use the analogy that its like twenty-some fully loaded 747's crashing every day of the year.
It's a huge problem, and it's gonna get worse. The pandemic is on its upward slope. We have seen from what goes on in a number of failed states - like Afghanistan, like Somalia, like the Sudan - what happens when governments disintegrate and are not able to provide the fundamental services that a population requires. What happens is people move into that vacuum and they're mostly bad people, and they do bad things. September 11th was clearly a good example of that and the activities of Al-Qaeda in Africa, as well as in the Far East in places like Indonesia and Malaysia, are very indicative of what happens when you just don't pay attention, and you don't help these countries develop stable institutions and the support and respect of their populations.
So you think the work of the Global Fight is not just humanitarian - it is in the U.S.'s interest to support the Global Fund?
It definitely is in our own interest. In my opinion we will benefit. But we'll benefit in a lot of other intangible ways in terms of our people learning more about how the world is unfolding.
The world as it is unfolding in the 21st century is very different from the world of the 19th century. It used to take six weeks to take a ship from England to go to India. And if the people in India were doing something stupid or something dysfunctional, the people in England didn't care, because it didn't have anything to do with them. Today we have seen that what somebody does in a place like Afghanistan, which is about as remote as it gets, can have a direct affect on the people of the U.S. And so this concept that we are all at risk in this very fragile world, is a very true concept.
But there is another reason. I think it's the right thing to do. It's just the right thing to do. Those aren't my words. I remember being at a dinner one night with Bill Gates, and someone was trying to persuade him that helping poor countries was the rational thing to do because they would be so grateful they would not commit acts of terrorism against us. And he said he did not believe that. He said there was only one reason to do it, and it's the right thing to do, and I agree with him wholeheartedly .
Why have more people not taken up the banner, if it's the right thing to do?
I think a lot of people have taken up the banner. Interestingly, this is one of those cases where the Congress is ahead of the population in terms of its understanding of the challenge and its understanding of the need. The U.S. Congress is far more sophisticated and informed and knowledgeable about the problem of the HIV/Aids pandemic globally and the issue of malaria and tuberculosis. In fact, Congress in the last year, appropriated more money for the Global Fund than the administration asked for.
But, in general, I think people in the rich countries don't see and touch and feel this problem. In the U.S., for example, malaria doesn't exist, TB virtually doesn't exist and Aids is considered to be reasonably under control. Most of the people that get Aids in the U.S. today, unfortunately, get it because they behave in some irresponsible way. It is only occasionally that a person who doesn't do anything to put themselves at risk contracts HIV in the U.S. today.
In Africa, and in other parts of the poor world, that is not true. In Africa, millions of children have the HIV virus, which they contracted just by being born. I've heard people say that in South Africa the most risky thing you can do is get married - that the highest risk factor for death at a young age is getting married. If you stay single, you have a higher survival rate. So it is a very different circumstance in the developing world than it is in the rich world, and that is why more people don't get involved. They don't have that immediate sense of the urgency. And that is why Friends of the Global Fight has put together some communication vehicles, including a very dramatic nine-minute movie to sensitize people to what this problem really looks like, what it's really all about and why they ought to care.
How are you going to motivate the public with your message about the Global Fund?
In any major emergency, in any war if you will, whether it is a war on disease or a war on terrorism, there has to be leadership. Somebody has to lead the way, and right now the people leading the way in the fight against these three diseases is the Global Fund.
But in most households in the U.S., most individual citizens have never heard of the Global Fund. Well, they are not going to be particularly vocal with respect to their political representatives unless they know something about it. I think it's extremely important to let the American public understand what the Global Fund is, how it works, why it works the way it does, and that it really is carrying this leadership role in trying to combat these three diseases. I think by getting people to understand - so that when they hear the term the "Global Fund," they know what it means - people will give it the support that I think it is entitled to and which it needs to be successful.
Do you see this happening on multiple levels? First people are educated about the work of the Global Fund. Then what?
I think that over time I'd like to see a situation where individual citizens give directly to the Global Fund or to Global Fund projects. You can imagine a program where people sponsor an individual so that they would pay for their ARV treatments - say $300-$400 a year - which is what people now pay to sponsor children in various child development programs around the world - $30 a month. I mean, most Americans can afford $30 a month! That is less than a couple packs of cigarettes a week and to save a person's life, to keep a person alive.
So there are a number of ways in which we would like to see financial resources channeled to the Fund. It would be unrealistic at this point to think that individual contributions, a quarter here, a dollar there, are going to displace the need for large amounts of government funding in the billions, but when people give financially to something they believe in, they become engaged, and they become committed, and they become spokesmen and they become supporters of the issue - and that's what we're trying to achieve.
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Is there something you'd like to say that I haven't asked?
I think the one thing I'd like to say is that there are a number of people in the United States that are working very hard to support people in all the countries of Africa who are trying to work with these issues and trying to deal with these diseases, and they should not give up hope because the people in the U.S. will support them and will be there to help them.
I think, however, that it is very important for every single African country and its leaders and its people to begin to put in place the institutions that would allow them to deliver programs that work - institutions that allow them to deliver anti-retroviral drugs to people who are already sick with Aids, programs to teach youth about the dangers of the disease and how to avoid it, and programs to intervene to prevent mother to child transmission of the disease. Those require local commitment and local infrastructure and it's time for, I think, the African countries to step up and put those systems in place.
Your past work suggests that you see an interrelation of issues. You've been involved in debt and aid for years. How do these issues relate to questions of African health care, prevention, public education and treatment?
There is no doubt that poverty breeds disease and all other kinds of disorder. And so, helping these countries get out of poverty is really the fundamental issue. Enhancing the status of women around the world is a huge issue in most of the countries where these diseases are out of control. To be brutally frank, women are second-class citizens and don't have any rights to speak of and are pushed around in society and taken advantage of sexually. That's got to stop, whether it's a Muslim country or a Christian country or a Buddhist country.
I think if we begin to address the status of women around the world, it will begin to improve the issue of childhood education, it'll improve the issue of child health. It'll improve the issue of agricultural productivity. It'll improve a lot of things that currently need fixing, so there is no doubt that poverty, lack of education, corruption, lack of access to health care - they're all related. These diseases will flourish and get out of control to the extent that these other positive conditions are not present.
Everybody on this planet comes to this planet in the same way with the same set of rights, and they're entitled to dignity, and they're entitled to the pursuit of happiness, and they're entitled to the best life they can have. So we've all got a responsibility here to work on all elements of the issue.
