Gayle Smith, a senior foreign policy adviser to President Obama and senior director for relief, stabilization and development at the National Security Council, addressed the closing plenary of the Global Business Coalition on HIV/Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria's annual conference in Washington DC. Excerpts from her speech:
Thank you so much for inviting me here. I want to start off by saying congratulations. I remember when this organization started. It was a great idea at the time - and that was not too long ago - but still, a time when making the case that there is a strategic, integral linkage between business and health was in a lot of places an uphill struggle. The content of what you have been and will be discussing is remarkable, so my hat goes off to all of you.
I've been asked to talk here about the president's priorities in [business and health] and I want to set the tone by talking about a couple of things that we've already seen from President Obama as key priorities. Those are the notions of service and engagement.
We just launched www.serve.gov as a way for Americans to identify volunteer opportunities around the country and we encourage that. For those of you who heard the president speak in Cairo, one of the things we heard consistently and repeatedly from him was for the United States to engage with the rest of the world. He is not just referring to the engagement of the U.S. with other countries, or the engagement of Americans with other people, but the engagement of all of us with our counterparts around the world.
That's one of the reasons why what you all do is so deeply, deeply important. Let me start by talking about something that President Obama talked about during the campaign - something he described as Global Health Architecture 20/20. The vision was: we could work towards a world where we had the ability in all countries and all communities to care for ourselves and our families - the clinics, the training, the resources, the materials, the inputs; that we could manage health systems so that we could collectively manage the challenges before us.
Driving that vision is two things. Managing global health is of critical importance for all of us, for reasons of basic security. Look what happened with the H1N1 virus. How quickly that moved, and – fortunately - how effective the existing architecture seems to have been. But there is also, fundamentally, a moral imperative. There is recognition that in a world that is more integrated, basic health is a right and a concern to all of us at home as well as abroad.
There is a third case that I think you all elevate in your work. It is that it makes good economic sense for businesses and communities to work together on health. I think that is a view that the president shares.
We recently rolled out the government's broad [agenda] for global health. There are several key components. One is to build on the extraordinary work done by President. George Bush on the building and launching of Pepfar (the President's Emergency Program for Aids Relief).
I think we all know that, though it has gotten easier in recent years, getting money for large-scale, coordinated programs hasn't always been the easiest thing to do or the most politically sellable thing to do, and President Bush did a terrific job. President Obama intends to build on Pepfar and double the funding. So we'll see a doubling of Pepfar over the next six years.
The president wanted to address a couple of other things when it comes to global health. One is a desire to address global health in its totality. There is no doubt that the HIV/Aids pandemic around the world, certainly in Africa (and indeed here in the U.S. and in this city), will continue to demand our persistent and robust attention. That [will] continue to be the case.
But there are other critical parts in global health that make for a healthy community. So over the next six years, we will be adding an additional $6 billion.for maternal and child health, for capacity building, and for neglected diseases. Our hope is that we, with our partners - the international institutions, yourselves, the NGO community, CBOs - can work towards a package of assistance that reflects the totality of people's health needs.
I think that you will see [the president] living up to a campaign commitment to double foreign assistance. As he said during the campaign, it might take a little longer than we hoped, but we hope to do it by 2015.
A lot of that assistance would be focused on Africa. Let me just say a few words about that. There is a very strong view that despite some shocking and alarming setbacks in Somalia and Sudan and some other parts of the continent, there is some remarkable, progress…on health, primary school enrollment, a new strategy for food security. Our hope is to build on that and to invest in that. I think you will see that huge portions of our resources over time, as in past administrations, will go towards Africa.
But one of the other things we want to be able to do with our partners in Africa is to be able to add to foreign direct investment - domestic investment, trade, and jobs - and that's where many of you come in.
We all hear a lot of talk about public-private partnerships. Over the coming years, it will be our hope that we can move from public-private partnerships as projects, to public-private partnerships as strategy. I'm persuaded that we can have a lot more impact, a lot more partners, and a lot better outcomes. We hope, over the coming years, to connect the dots.
The notion of the workplace as a platform for health - what a lot of you are moving towards and working on - is a terrific idea. It is the kind of force multiplier, to borrow a term from our better funded, much larger, more powerful military side of the house, that makes a huge difference. It is one of the things we would like to explore.
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How, in looking at the workplace as a platform, can we help our partners reach further, reach deeper, build greater capacity and achieve more progress? I can't underscore how important this is…For a CEO to raise the issue of global health before the American public, before the American Congress, counts in ways you cannot imagine. It says that this is good business, it says this is the right thing to do, it says this is in our collective interest. That advocacy is critical.
[In a time of scarce resources], there are going to be debates on how much we should send abroad and how much we should keep at home, and that is a fair debate. But your voices show again that it is the right thing to do, it makes good business sense, it achieves progress in global health…To have the leaders of major companies around the world stand up and talk about it, stand up and do something about it, helps us on that front.
Last but not least, it sends that important signal that it's going to take all of us to get this right. [Government] cannot do this alone, and we don't want to do this alone. We want to tackle this with the American public, with the global public, with our partners in government in the developing world, with our partners among other donors - but certainly and prominently with the private sector.
Let me repeat what I said in the beginning: Thank you so much for what you do. You make me enormously proud, and you make me enormously confident that we can achieve the goals to which we all aspire. Thank you so much.
