Universities focused on global health will have to collaborate more with each other and with industry and philanthropic organizations in the face of the Trump administration’s multibillion-dollar aid cuts, according to academic leaders from around the world.
Funding covering projects tackling conditions such as AIDS, tuberculosis and Ebola has been upended since Donald Trump returned to power in January, and speakers at Times Higher Education’s World Academic Summit said that it would be impossible to replace the lost dollars overnight.
Mosa Moshabela, vice chancellor of the University of Cape Town, said that his institution had been one of the largest recipients of National Institutes of Health funding outside the U.S., supporting projects in areas such as HIV and tuberculosis prevention, and that his institution had been “impacted a lot” by the White House’s decisions.
“We realize the danger of having placed all our eggs in one basket, pretty much,” said Moshabela, himself a leading public health researcher.
“We know that, in terms of scale of funding, we’re not necessarily going to have one source that can replace the amount [we received] from the NIH, but by spreading our partnerships we can still achieve similar results—and we are strengthening our partnerships in the Middle East, in Asia, across the globe, and also looking at new donors that are coming through.”
Moshabela said that Cape Town was also putting pressure on the South African government to increase research spending, highlighting that it currently spent only 0.6 percent of gross domestic product in this area, despite a long-standing target for the outlay to reach a minimum of 1.5 percent.
“Even between universities, we are adopting the principle of cooperation over competition,” Moshabela continued.
“For a long time, we were competing for the same sources of funding, but now what we’re trying to do as a strategy is to cooperate more rather than compete over sources of funding.”
Vivek Goel, vice chancellor of Canada’s University of Waterloo, agreed that it would take time to fill the funding gap left by U.S. cuts.
“I don’t think it’s realistic to expect that overnight we are going to fill those gaps,” he said. “I think we became very reliant on a certain model … I think in collaboration between governments, philanthropy, industry and our institutions we can come up with new ways of working that can replace that work [on global health, but] not necessarily all of that funding.”
Goel, another public health researcher, highlighted that it was not just U.S. funding that was being lost, pointing to research that was funded by Canadian sources or philanthropic organizations but that depended on clinics or infrastructure operated by the United States Agency for International Development. Researchers may also lose access to Centers for Disease Control data, he warned.
Drawing down funding for global health research in the future will require a change of mindset, Moshabela argued, such as focusing on solutions with wider commercial benefit to attract the support of pharmaceutical companies and working to develop broader ecosystems and not just clinical interventions to win funding from philanthropists.
Deborah McNamara, president of RCSI University of Medicine and Health Sciences, said that Western universities should approach the funding challenges “with humility.”
“Our partners in the Global South have been doing more with less for a very, very long time,” she noted.
“I think we’ve all observed over time waste in development funding, and in the surgical arena certainly we often discover [that] at hospitals that we work with they have large amounts of donated equipment that perhaps can’t be maintained, can’t be run, [and] isn’t operational.
“By listening more we can reduce the waste that happens and direct [funding] more effectively.”
