Is mainstream media doing enough investigative journalism on the Gates Foundation? Here is a shining example of how mainstream media and professionals in civil society can complement one another in developing an analysis of the activities of the Foundation. Kristi Heim has referred her readers to Philippe Boucher's blog. These two Cascadians living and working near the Foundation give Gates Keepers hope.

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Gates Foundation ramps up tobacco control efforts in Africa
Kristi Heim
Business of Giving
Seattle Times
4 February 2010

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is stepping up the fight against tobacco with a $7 million grant to the American Cancer Society announced today. That follows a $10 million grant to the World Health Organization in December.

Both are aimed at curbing the tobacco industry's inroads in Africa, where cancer is emerging as a serious public health threat in addition to diseases such as malaria, AIDS and TB.

The $7 million, five-year grant to the American Cancer Society (ACS), which has taken on a more global role recently, will go toward managing a health coalition called the African Tobacco Control Consortium.

Consortium members include the ACS, Africa Tobacco Control Regional Initiative, Africa Tobacco Control Alliance, Framework Convention Alliance, Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids and the International Union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease.

The consortium will work in 46 countries of sub-Saharan Africa to reduce tobacco use by helping implement policies such as advertising bans, tobacco tax increases, graphic warning labels and promoting smoke free environments, in line with the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, the world's first public health treaty;

The World Health Organization started a new tobacco control effort in Africa with the help of a $10 million grant from the Gates Foundation late last year. Its goal is to prevent tobacco use from becoming as prevalent in Africa as it is in other parts of the world.

If tobacco use continues to grow at its current rate, it will kill more than 8 million people a year in 20 years, and more than 80 percent of them will be in developing countries, WHO predicts.

"Tobacco breeds poverty, killing people in their most productive years," said Dr. Ala Alwan, WHO assistant director-general for noncommunicable diseases and mental health. It consumes family and health-care budgets, and where resources are already scarce, "money spent on tobacco products is money not spent on such essentials as education, food and medicine."

For a detailed look at tobacco control in Africa, see Philippe Boucher's bilingual blog here.

I wrote about the Gates Foundation's challenges in fighting tobacco use in China here.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/thebusinessofgiving/2010975320_gates_foundation_ramps_up_toba.html?syndication=rss

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Thank you Kristi

Kristi Heim, the Seattle Times journalist who writes the blog The business of giving, gently refers her readers to TCA at the end of her post devoted to the new grants awarded by the Gates Foundation to promote tobacco control in Africa. Thank you Kristi. Our readers know that as much as I admire the generosity of the Gates and Bloomberg Foundations to promote tobacco control I am also very concerned about the way their money is used: I think much more attention should be given to the principles of transparency, good governance, accountability, participation of all, control of travel and hospitality expenses. What lessons (if any) will be learned from the way IDRC managed the first 5.2 million grant?  How will ACS and the Consortium partners integrate those basic principles -or not- in their management remains to be seen.

http://blogsofbainbridge.typepad.com/africa/2010/02/thank-you-kristi.html