Inside a Coordinated Response to COVID From a Billionaire Who Saw It Coming

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It’s fair to say that most of the world was caught off guard as the pandemic began spreading around the globe in 2020, but Jeff Skoll saw it coming. 

A self-described social entrepreneur, Skoll regularly ranks near the top quarter-percentile of the Forbes 400, due to wealth acquired as the first employee and later the president of eBay. His philanthropic and commercial portfolio includes a foundation that will have granted more than $1 billion to 1,000 global organizations by year-end. There’s also an investment group that helps entrepreneurs seek solutions to the world’s most pressing problems, and Participant, a media company that has married art and activism with films like “An Inconvenient Truth” and “Spotlight.”

For more than a decade, Skoll has funded with an eye toward pandemic prevention—one of five goals of a $100 million Global Threats Fund he founded in 2009. When that fund intentionally sunsetted in 2017, peace and security work was incorporated into the Skoll Foundation, while the pandemic and climate portfolios were spun off. A new standalone, Ending Pandemics, has since worked to bring about systems change and expand epidemic intelligence, with an emphasis on helping countries improve critical early detection and response.

Then there’s “Contagion,” the 2011 film Participant co-produced, which was scientifically sound enough to draw eerie parallels as COVID spread: A deadly bat-borne virus is spread by respiratory droplets, as whole swathes of the world are quarantined. 

So how did all that prescience pay off in terms of Skoll’s philanthropy? So far, it has fueled a global response that includes significant work in Africa and, to lesser extent, the United States. Skoll recently upped the ante on pandemic mitigation by $100 million, a number that may collectively rise to $500 million to date across Skoll’s organizations. Here’s where that started, and where it’s going.

A proximate approach

As we reported earlier this year, the Skoll Foundation took the upheavals of 2020 as a cue to align its internal focus around five strategic priorities it sees as interconnected: strengthening health systems and preventing pandemics; mobilizing climate action; reimagining inclusive and sustainable economies; keeping democracy safe by promoting effective governance; and advancing racial justice.

Skoll’s approach to catalyzing transformational social change hinges on connectedness, a “proximate approach” that helps the experts closest to the problems collaborate with a wide range of actors to find bold and sustainable solutions. 

Skoll’s current COVID response builds on the foundation’s first efforts in 2020, which in turn build on Ending Pandemics’ investments in networking-based early warning systems like the CORDS Network, GIDEON and Sentinel. In a philanthropic sector that largely ignored the risk of a global pandemic, Skoll was one of the very few philanthropists looking at this space, and the work of Ending Pandemics allowed Skoll and his giving vehicles to hit the ground running once COVID began.

Hindsight is 2020

In April of 2020—still early days in the pandemic—Jeff Skoll announced a $100 million gift to the foundation specifically to fund both “marathon and sprint” efforts to fight COVID-19 globally. The gift quadrupled the foundation’s year-to-year grantmaking, which stood at $51.8 million in 2019.

Funding was deployed along two strategies concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa—epidemiological tools and respiratory equipment. As a former ambassador to South Africa, Skoll Foundation CEO Don Gips said his time there informed the foundation’s continent-wide efforts and built on long-term relationships.

Skoll quickly partnered with the Africa CDC’s Africa Donor Collaborative on testing and contact tracing, and began resourcing ventilators and other scarce medical devices to help respiratory patients in both formal and low-resource settings. Gips said an important piece of its support was identifying gaps in the front-line service delivery system so services didn’t stop.

Skoll also boosted the Africa CDC’s national and systemic response, which included the local work of longtime Skoll social entrepreneurs like Last Mile Health, which creates response teams to deliver healthcare in some of the globe’s most remote communities. 

The foundation is typically a global funder, and Gips says it hadn’t intended to engage in the U.S. at first, but stepped in as the national response faltered and COVID cases climbed. Skoll developed a partnership at the state level with the National Governors Association, and was among the first funders of the COVID Collaborative, which creates a unified response between local, state and national leaders and experts in health, education and the economy. 

At the same time, Skoll funded across its cohort of existing grantees to support their safety and their ability to pivot delivery models to the response. 

Evolving goals in 2021

In September of 2021, the Skoll Foundation pledged another $100 million over five years to support the goals of President Joe Biden’s Global COVID-19 Summit—a cross-sector meeting of more than 100 representatives of government, the private sector, philanthropy and civil influencers that took place on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly.

Gips said the summit’s twin goals—producing a coordinated plan to end this pandemic and preventing future ones—align with Skoll’s emerging priorities. 

In making the announcement, Gips said that philanthropy has a role to act as “risk capital” with governments to do “what philanthropy does best… take risks, support civil society voices and test out solutions” that governments can ultimately adopt. 

Other philanthropies at the summit also outlined their responses, including the Rockefeller Foundation’s $1 billion investment in a greener and healthier recovery, and the Mastercard Foundation’s $1.3 billion partnership with the Africa CDC to vaccinate 50 million people. 

Funding long-term preparedness

Skoll’s pandemic strategy has evolved materially in the year since the first funding tranche. This time, the emphasis is on investing risk capital in life-saving measures, and supporting the coordinated response and prevention efforts championed at the summit.

For instance, as Skoll recognized that ventilators were no longer the point of greatest need in low-resource environments, the foundation pivoted to a longer-term investment of risk capital in Oxygen Hub, which uses a franchise model to lower barriers to localized oxygen production throughout Africa.

Gips said building out Africa’s largest network of oxygen entrepreneurs is a good illustration of Skoll’s proximate approach. The investment is expected to be self-sustaining over time, and will solve immediate needs and strengthen systems more broadly. Local production will also lay the groundwork for responding to future pandemics.

Skoll is also arming community health workers with the protective equipment and medical resources they need to stay safe by backing organizations like the COVID Action Fund for Africa, which provides PPE where needs are most glaring across 18 African countries. 

The foundation’s priorities mirror the U.S. government’s emphasis on a coordinated response. During the U.N. summit, USAID Administrator Samantha Power announced the country’s intention to commit $50 million to increase access to oxygen in countries around the world, and build a global coalition to coordinate investments in local providers. She also chaired a session that focused on equality in supplies, treatment and worker safety. 

The foundation also views the crisis as “a moment to also build a strong, well-resourced pandemic preparedness system while strengthening health systems for the future.” 

Those measures include addressing gaps through the Africa CDC’s unique Africa Donor Collaborative, and building on the surveillance work of Ending Pandemics and organizations like the Global Alliance for Pandemic Prevention.

Skoll also invested in ONE and the Pandemic Action Network to support the recommendations of the Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness & Response (IPPPR), which was established by the WHO Director-General to provide an evidence-based path toward meeting health threats.

Coordination needed

Above all, Gips said Skoll sees this moment as a pivotal opportunity for all sectors to unite on a common cause. This is a once-in-a-century problem that needs to be addressed despite the costs and challenges, in order to prepare for the next unexpected global crisis—whether a pandemic or some other disaster.

On a financial level, the challenges of pandemic preparedness are well beyond daunting for any one player, even considered in context. For a sense of scale, Gips cited a May 2021 McKinsey report that estimates the necessity of spending between $85 and $130 billion collectively over the next two years. Substantially reducing the likelihood of future pandemics will tally roughly $20 billion to $50 billion annually thereafter. That may seem an enormous sum, but it pales in comparison to an estimated $16 trillion the world has already spent grappling with COVID-19, according to the report.

As the mindset shifts to building back, Gips said it’s time for governments and philanthropy to push forward, and that nobody is doing enough on areas like early detection and building vaccine equity. But he also recognized the need to step up to this moment, and get it right next time: “If we can’t come together for this, how will we tackle any [of the world’s] other problems?”