Global Health Advocacy Incubator Statement on Urgency of Meeting Gavi Funding Commitments
The Global Health Advocacy Incubator urges President Trump to maintain the United States’ pledge to Gavi, funding which will enable 500 million children to be vaccinated against deadly diseases—saving more than 8 million lives—over the next five years.
Gavi is known for its accountability and effectiveness. Its model also includes increased co-financing followed by complete graduation of countries as their incomes rise, partly as the result of the healthier populations and economies that Gavi enables. Nineteen countries have fully graduated from Gavi to date, including Indonesia, which is now a Gavi contributor. We have witnessed this progress firsthand: as a Gavi partner, we support countries to secure sustainable financing for immunization and primary health care. In Ghana, Kenya, Madagascar and Nigeria, the first countries where our work began in 2023, governments have increased their spending on immunization by hundreds of millions of dollars.
While eighty percent of the donor funding for Gavi comes from other countries, the U.S. funding withdrawal puts those contributions—and lives—at risk. Because of vaccines, and Gavi in particular, more children are living past their first birthdays that at any other time in human history. Childhood deaths have been cut in half since 1990, with 40 percent of that progress coming from vaccines, and parents of vaccinated children no longer live in fear that their children will develop brain damage, blindness and loss of hearing from measles or are paralyzed from polio.
We call on the Administration and Congress to maintain our political and moral leadership by completing our mission of ending preventable childhood deaths.
About the Global Health Advocacy Incubator
The Global Health Advocacy Incubator (GHAI), an initiative of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, uses the power of advocacy to reduce preventable deaths and to improve health at scale by changing policies and strengthening systems. GHAI supports civil society organizations and advocacy movements in more than 40 countries to pass public health policies that save lives, reduce disease and prevent injuries, increase investments in public health and create a healthier and more equitable future for all.