Looking at Davos: An Interview Between +SocialGood’s Shariha Khalid and Nancy Lee of Wellcome Trust

Global leaders gathered to discuss the future at the World Economic Forum in Davos. +SocialGood Connector Shariha Khalid reported from the event to discuss the leading themes, solutions, and how we can shape the conversation. In this interview, Shariha speaks with Nancy Lee of the Wellcome Trust, a global charitable foundation that supports scientists and researchers, takes on big problems, fuels imaginations, and sparks debate.

Meet Nancy Lee: Nancy is the Global Policy Lead at the Wellcome Trust and jointly manages Wellcome’s Global Policy Team. Her primary areas of work cover global health policy focusing on epidemic preparedness, access to medicines, global health architecture, medicines quality and financing for R&D. She has almost ten years’ experience in policy and advocacy, previously working on policy issues in the UK and the EU. Nancy holds qualifications in Bint Bus, LLB from Griffith University, Australia and an LLM from Kings College London.

*Note: Interview edited lightly for clarity

Shariha Khalid: Nancy, thank you for taking time to speak to me about innovative finance within the context of the SDGs. Could you explain a bit about the work that you do at the Wellcome Trust and what your objectives are with the philanthropic foundation?

Nancy Lee: The Wellcome Trust is a global charitable foundation. We spend around £1 billion per year funding researchers and scientists, with an aim of improving the health of people everywhere.

So from a policy perspective, we focus on ensuring that the research that we fund has an impact on people as quickly as possible. We also work to influence policymakers on broader issues, which we hope will, again, accelerate healthy outcomes for people globally.

Our focuses are around two areas broadly, on global health challenges, work includes epidemic preparedness. And the other area is around research culture and capacity, which will, again, support the development of innovations, and the research ecosystem, to facilitate and accelerate our research for health impact.

In terms of innovative financing, we fund research across industry and academia and look for different mechanisms and models of how we can encourage innovators and researchers to engage in research for both products and other outcomes to improve health. For example, a device to reduce trauma during intubation. Or the clinical trial for VSV vaccine for Ebola.

Shariha: Great. Can you please tell me about, from your work, where you see the opportunities are for innovative financing for the SDGs? Because if we look specifically at health, there are other determinants of health too. Please share what you’ve seen or heard, or what you see as areas with potential.

Nancy: So I think health underpins and supports a number of other SDGs, including education and gender equality. It’s really enabling populations to lead healthy lives and be more productive, and to be happier as well. So one of the initiatives that we’ve recently supported, which is the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations is about developing vaccines for epidemics, so effectively stopping those early so that you maintain a healthy population and healthy workforce. So we see that almost as an insurance policy against potential epidemic threats.

Shariha: Yeah, insurance. I believe as an industry and as a product, there’s a lot of potential for innovation there. Can you share your thoughts and ideas on that, please?

Nancy: So I guess insurance, as a mechanism, is around transferring risk and providing some stability. So that’s what we could hope we can do for innovations as well, or as an incentive to drive behaviours.

So for example, if you think around the field of antimicrobial resistance, part of the challenge is how you can support or encourage farmers away from using antibiotics or antimicrobials to ensure they have the best production of livestock because they want to ensure that they don’t have an infection which could wipe out their stock. And one way that potentially you could think about it is, how could you insure production if you said, “If you don’t use antibiotics then the program would insure production of your crops. So if there was an infection, then insurance would cover it?”

Applying similar thinking, how do we de-risk, or shift risk for innovators or companies through funding mechanisms and aspects of partnership to provide them with the space and security to innovate for an end product that is impactful for health.

Shariha: So in the context of where funding could be unlocked in order to help innovators who are working on the ground, researchers and innovators, can you share any examples of models of blended finance or any other models that are out there within philanthropy that you’re aware of, or maybe how you are engaging with a community around this? Because ultimately, if it’s a grant-making model alone, it may be able to help in the early stage of innovations, but what about scaling them later?

Nancy: That’s a really interesting question. It’s something that we’re considering more broadly. I’d have to say that most of our partnerships have been around creating joint funding vehicles to fund public and private organizations and individuals to achieve an outcome. I think there’s obviously the benefit of, for example, a number of governments and philanthropies contributing, so you leverage what you contribute via others.

I think there are different mechanisms that you could consider, challenge prizes is another one that’s being used a lot recently. I think going forward, there is more opportunity to consider impact bonds. Also blended finance models. I think it depends on what your objectives are in terms of the product and who you’ve got in your partnership. But increasingly, I would say also looking at the different stakeholders who are starting to fund in this space, there are different models we could be consider.

For example, how might we better engage development banks in supporting capacity for research. I mean, this is all a very new space and sort of new thinking for us as well. There are new ideas, but nothing that we’ve necessarily substantiated, but certainly would like to continue that conversation with other stakeholders.

Shariha: Lastly, what do you think we need to raise awareness of across communities?

Nancy: So I think my key thought is that it would be great if as a community we can raise the awareness of the importance of supporting health innovators, health research, or research for healthy outcomes because not only does that also address SDG 3, but has an impact on a number of other SDGs as well because healthy populations, healthy community leads to healthier and productive lives.

Shariha: Thank you so much, Nancy.