Rockefeller Foundation is one of the oldest philanthropies working in Asia. Its earliest foundation grant in 1913 was made to the All-India School of Hygiene and Public Health in Calcutta. Many of India’s premier public health institutes including the National Institute of Virology (NIV), Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) and the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) were founded by the foundation’s early support.

Since then, it has come a long way as the foundation continues its work in the areas of health, energy, gender and innovation in India. Deepali Khanna, Managing Director of the foundation’s Asia Regional Office spoke to BusinessLine on a range of issues that the foundation is currently focused on. Edited excerpts.

There is this perception that the rich world isn’t doing enough to help the developing countries to address the pandemic issue better, your thoughts?

The global community hasn’t been able to put its act together to look at this pandemic in a concerted way. The international community really needs to support early detection and management of the virus and invest in a sustainable recovery for all.

From a foundation perspective, we’ve announced $150 million to the (Pandemic Prevention) Institute, and have called for greater collaboration to build a global early warning system. I think there was a huge gap where information wasn’t flowing and by setting up this institute that we announced at the World Health summit, we hope we will be able to address it.

Genomic sequencing is essential to track all the Covid-19 variants and Omicron is not going to be the last one. To strengthen the prevention response in India, we have been able to support CCMB (The Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology) which helped rapidly identify omicron cases. I feel a little concerned because countries that have been transparent like South Africa which alerted the world have faced backlash. We should encourage countries to be more transparent rather than penalise them.

The work that we have done over the past year, with the Indian government, with the private sector, research institutes including leading centres like C-CAMP (The Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms) has been critical for the underlying capacity around diagnostics and testing, which enabled us to be vigilant around these new emerging variants and pathogens.

Does the foundation see itself as a catalyst to goad governments or as a kind of a force multiplier?

One needs to have a holistic perspective when aiming for systems-level transformation. In the ambit of ecosystem actors, obviously, governments are critical, because, at the end of the day, it is important for them to own, to scale, to make the intervention sustainable. We provide support through technical capabilities and sharing of knowledge.

The second piece is how do we get the private sector to be playing an effective role, and this is what we did in India. We worked with players to bring down the cost of Covid testing kits from ₹4,500 to about ₹200. All this even as we keep the interest of the disadvantaged, vulnerable, marginalised communities uppermost in our minds.

What is the kind of work that the foundation has been doing in India?

Access to reliable energy for instance. Even in a place like India, it was an issue for nearly 250 million people. So, even though the government had said, about five years ago that energy has reached every village, it did not necessarily mean that it was reliable. We really wanted to see how we can provide energy access to all, how can we really end energy poverty in India, and obviously the government wanted to do that as well. We try to really understand the priorities of the government and the role we can play. It could be technology transfer; could be capacity building, it could be sharing of best global practices, whatever is needed.

The issues that we wanted to address are an enabling policy environment, investments being protected, debt financing, and technological innovations. To unlock all these four areas, we set up an entity in India called Smart Power India, which is a section 8 company that became a one-stop-shop, including setting up 13 mini-grids to demonstrate its abilities.

As a result of it, we have now the private sector folks like Tata Power that wants to provide, reliable electricity to 10,000 villages across India, which for us is pretty amazing. We then extended (this experiment) to Myanmar and later Africa and at COP26 we were able to make a very bold commitment of seeding a global energy alliance for people and the planet (GEAPP). Emerging from our India work. where we have been able to collate $10 billion for this platform, which will be able to provide energy access in the next 10 years to a billion people, create 150 million jobs and reduce carbon emissions.

We were the first movers into this and we put in $500 million from our foundation. We were able to get Bezos Fund to put $500 million into it and IKEA foundation to put in $500 million. So out of this $10 billion, $1.5 billion is coming from the foundation world and the rest of it is coming from us facilitating a robust business model by attracting multilateral development banks, bilateral and others to come into the fold.

We are prioritising GEAPP, that’s our first moonshot and the second is the Pandemic Prevention Institute. We are going to be focused and putting investments around these two programmes. We also went in for a bond issuance which had never happened in our history, we were able to get $700 million additionally.

We really see ourselves committed to ending poverty. There are multiple levels at which we have to be working with global leadership to collaborate and cooperate with a range of stakeholders. We’re a 109-year-old organisation, our mission throughout has been the same, to serve the well-being of humanity.

We are science-driven philanthropy focused on building collaborative relationships with our partners and ecosystem actors. The Rockefeller Foundation seeks to inspire and foster large-scale human impact. We continue to advance new frontiers of science, data, policy, and innovation to solve global challenges related to health, food, power and economic mobility-related issues.

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