WASHINGTON - A new nonprofit charity unveiled plans Wednesday to promote digital payments for people outside the financial system, with support from Google and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
The Mojaloop Foundation said it would work on free and open-source software that can be used by disadvantaged communities and the unbanked around the world.
The initiative aims to serve an estimated 1.7 billion people who lack access to digital financial services, according to a statement by the organization, which is also backed by Omidyar Network and the Rockefeller Foundation.
Mojaloop executive director Paula Hunter said the aim was to provide "more affordable, accessible digital financial services" to people outside the banking system.
The move comes amid an effort by the Facebook-backed Libra Association to create a new digital payments system to help make financial transfers easier and less costly for people outside the financial system.
The announcement Wednesday aims to create an inter-operable system based on the Mojaloop software project.
Named after the Swahili word for "one," Mojaloop is a reference model for payment inter-operability to barriers to money transfers large or small, the organization said.
The open source software was first established by the Gates Foundation in 2017.
"Our vision of universal financial inclusion is a world where everyone, everywhere, can access and use the digital financial services they need to build economic security and resilience," said Kosta Peric, the chairman of the Mojaloop Foundation and deputy director of financial services for the poor at the Gates Foundation.
Agence France-Presse
LONDON - Social media platform TikTok and the philanthropic Gates Foundation donated $10 million each on Wednesday to the vaccine alliance GAVI to help fund efforts to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic in Africa.
GAVI said the funds would be used to distribute and deploy any new vaccines against COVID-19 once they are developed, trialed and licensed.
It would also help prevent "a potentially catastrophic impact on immunization programs across the developing world," GAVI Chief Executive Seth Berkley said in a statement.
GAVI is a public-private partnership backed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Health Organization, the World Bank, UNICEF and others, which arranges bulk buys to reduce vaccine costs for poor countries.
Speaking to Reuters last week Berkley said he was encouraged by the sheer number of potential COVID-19 vaccines in the early stages of development around the world, which he said would slim down to a smaller number as some progressed and some failed.
"Today there are 76 vaccines on WHO website listed, of which six are already in clinical trials, but actually the number is substantially higher than that, it is well over 100," he said.
"That is really good, because what is bubbling up is science from around the world.
"The challenge is going to be now, once all of the science bubbles up, is to have some standardized criteria that one can narrow it down to a smaller number. And what is going to be important is being able to make those choices based on science and not politics."
GAVI said this month it planned to disburse $29 million to support health systems in 13 lower-income countries to fight COVID-19.
-reuters-
WASHINGTON — The US government and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation pledged Wednesday to jointly invest $200 million over the next 4 years to achieve affordable gene therapy-based cures for sickle cell disease (SCD) and HIV.
The administration of President Donald Trump announced earlier this year its intention to end the HIV epidemic over the next decade and has also identified SCD, which disproportionately affects people of African descent, as a condition requiring greater attention.
Gene therapy is a relatively new area of medicine designed to replace faulty genes in the body that are responsible for a disorder, and has been responsible for new treatments for blindness and certain types of leukemia.
But the treatments are complex and costly, ruling them out as an option for most of the world.
Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, said the collaboration would focus therefore on "access, scalability and affordability" to make sure the eventual treatments are available globally.
The NIH and Gates Foundation aim to achieve clinical trials in the United States and countries in sub-Saharan Africa within the next seven to 10 years.
Sickle cell disease is a group of inherited red blood cell disorders characterized by the presence of an abnormal protein in the red blood cells, causing the feet and hands to swell, fatigue, jaundice, and episodic or chronic pain.
Over time the disease can harm a patients' vital organs, bones, joints and skin and it is currently only curable via a blood and bone marrow transplant, available to only a tiny fraction of people who have the disease.
When it comes to HIV, antiretroviral therapy (ART) are now able to reduce patients' viral load to the point that they are undetectable and cannot be further transmitted.
But "a major goal is to find a cure, whereby lifelong ART would not be required," said the NIH's Anthony Fauci.
Though SCD is a genetically inherited disease, and HIV is acquired from infection, gene-based treatments are said to hold promise for both, and "many of the technical challenges for gene-based cures are expected to be common to both diseases."
The goal for SCD is to achieve a gene-based intervention that either corrects the gene mutation responsible or promotes fetal hemoglobin gene expression to achieve normal hemoglobin function.
For HIV, the proposed cure would involve targeting the reservoir of proviral DNA that lurks inside a small number of cells even after many years of ART.
The NIH said that approximately 95 percent of the 38 million people living with HIV globally are in the developing world, with 67 percent in sub-Saharan Africa, half of whom are living untreated. Around 1.1 million Americans are affected
SCD affects approximately 100,000 Americans, according to official figures. Fifteen million babies will be born with SCD globally over the next 30 years, with about 75 percent of those births occurring in sub-Saharan Africans, said the NIH.
source: news.abs-cbn.com
