What Happened to the Global Forum for Health Research

Bibliographic Data

ID15540208
AuthorsGeorge Weisz (0000-0002-4158-4685, McGill University, corresponding author)
Year2020
Volume15
Issue8
Pages1212-1224
Publication date2020-04-15
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueGlobal Public Health (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1744-1692 • E-ISSN: 1744-1706
PublisherTaylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/17441692.2020.1752767
PMID32295489
OpenAlexW3016726595
LanguageEN
References cited13

The Global Forum for Health Research (GFHR) was founded in 1998. It was the culmination of an advocacy movement started in 1987 to campaign for the expansion and coordination of health research benefitting low- and middle-income countries. It was largely funded by the World Bank and embraced that institution's emphasis on cost effectiveness. But its small budget prevented it from assuming the central role in global health research that its supporters had envisaged. It took on more modest tasks, focusing on advocacy, organising an annual conference and monitoring research funding. In 2010, it was absorbed amid general indifference by another small organization, the Council on Health Research for Development (COHRED) and eventually disappeared from sight. We argue in this paper that its fate had two major causes. First, it resulted from operational and budgetary problem and its inability to attract the new money that was pouring into Global Health (GH). Second, it reflected the aggressive efforts by the WHO to reclaim leadership in this domain. Underlying this failure, however, was the inherent difficulty of coordinating the ideologically fragmented and individualistically oriented GH research domain

Economic growth · Economics · Global health · Health care · Ideology · Institution · Political science · Public relations · Sociology · Global Health and Surgery · Global Maternal and Child Health · Global Public Health Policies and Epidemiology · Law · Public Administration