Donors commit 4.3 billion dollar funding to provide vaccines for children

Major public and private donors including the UK government and Bill Gates have committed 4.3 billion dollars to provide vaccines for children, especially the poor children in developing countries, in an international conference held in London on Monday.

The pledging conference held by the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI) convened political leaders as Britain's Prime Minister David Cameron and Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, whose governments have committed 1,335 million dollars and 677 million dollars respectively.

The biggest private donor is the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which donated 1 billion dollars.

Together with other sources the amount committed on Monday reached 4.3 billion dollars, which exceeded an initial target of 3.7 billion. That brings GAVI's total available funding for the period 2011 to 2015 to 7.6 billion dollars.

The GAVI Alliance is a Geneva-based public-private partnership aimed at improving health in the world's poorest countries, which is going to use the money to immunize more than 250 million of the world's poorest children against life-threatening diseases by 2015.

"For the first time in history, children in developing countries will receive the same vaccines against diarrhea and pneumonia as children in rich countries," said Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

"Together we must do more to ensure that all children -- no matter where they live -- have equal access to life-saving vaccines."

It is estimated that every 20 seconds a children dies of vaccine-preventable disease.

Source: Xinhua

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