GBCHealth is announcing to our broad network today changes in how we engage with member companies and organizations going into 2014.  The purpose of these changes is to sharpen our focus on how the private sector can best support achievement of high-priority global health goals in view of a significantly changed private-public landscape since our founding in 2001.

For 2014, GBCHealth will shift away from a membership model funded by annual dues.

In addition, GBCHealth will sharpen its focus on engaging the private sector in attaining the health Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and informing the post-2015 goals. GBCHealth will pursue closer involvement with companies in support of achieving these targets, which include reducing maternal, newborn and child deaths and advancing HIV, TB and malaria efforts.  Within those areas, we will target efforts to the countries with the greatest disease burden and deaths. These changes will enable GBCHealth to strengthen its core work while lessening dependence on annual dues-based membership funding.

Going forward, GBCHealth’s activities will be funded by grants from companies and public sector partners that seek deeper involvement in the final push to achieve the health-related MDGs by their December 31, 2015 deadline.

In addition, GBCHealth will receive support from constituency responsibilities such as its role as Focal Point of the Private Sector Delegation to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria and as implementer of the Corporate Alliance on Malaria in Africa (CAMA), a group of companies fighting to eliminate malaria deaths.

An outcome of these changes is that GBCHealth will sustain some but not all of its activities and services.  The GBCHealth offices in South Africa, Kenya and China are being closed.  We will review the need for satellite offices in high-priority countries. In addition, we will adjust our staffing, with a smaller team carrying out our work.

Our reorganization is consistent with the rapidly changing landscape for private sector involvement in global health. When Ambassador Richard Holbrooke took leadership of GBCHealth in 2001, HIV/AIDS soared at crisis levels and few companies had programs to protect their employees and communities. Today, thanks in part to our work, corporate health programs of all types are increasingly mainstreamed with dedicated staff and firms to deliver them. We’ve seen remarkable progress in the private sector’s role in increasing access to medicines and preventing HIV, TB, malaria and other conditions.  We are proud to have helped usher in these improvements and are now restructuring ourselves in a way that best addresses today’s landscape.

We are confident that with the changes we are making, GBCHealth will redouble its force as a catalyst for private sector leadership in achieving the most important health and humanitarian goals ever established.

Additional information can be found here, and we invite you to contact GBCHealth to discuss these changes in more detail.  We welcome your continued engagement. If you are interested in exploring a closer association with GBCHealth around the goals described in this letter, please contact Michael Schreiber at .

Sincerely,