In this ‘Special Report’ produced for GlobalPost, The GroundTruth Project investigated the increasing role of private corporations in global health, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. Over the last four decades, as foreign aid budgets have tightened, the United States government — particularly the US Agency for International Development (USAID) — has turned to the private sector, partnering with companies to utilize their expertise and vast resources in order to improve health outcomes in some of the world’s poorest countries. Yet there is little measurement of the nature and efficacy of these collaborative efforts, and little accountability for their success. Our reporting sought to explain to a broad audience the US government’s rising reliance on public-private partnerships in its global health efforts, and to shed light on what these partnerships look like on the ground in an interactive, innovative multimedia series. The GroundTruth Project dispatched reporters to Cameroon, Democratic Republic of the Congo, South Africa, and Tanzania to find out how four of the world’s largest and most iconic corporations are working to improve global health. In Tanzania, we looked at Coca-Cola’s ulterior motives for investing in water sanitation projects. In Cameroon, we considered how ExxonMobil’s efforts to reduce malaria are at odds with the fossil fuel company’s contributions to climate change. In the DRC we cast a close lens on a widely praised drug donation program led by pharmaceutical giant Merck. And in South Africa we explored how a Johnson and Johnson-backed mobile health program for pregnant women was poised for expansion despite only anecdotal evidence about its efficacy. We also reported from Washington and New York, and through months of research, dozens of interviews, and a FOIA request to USAID, we found that there are no standards for measuring the outcomes of these complicated partnerships, which have spent billions of dollars on public health projects around the world. Some of the partnerships proved successful, some blurred the line between philanthropy and corporate profit, and for others, the results remained unproven beyond anecdotal evidence. For all, the question remains: where do these partnerships cross the line between charity and business as usual? With the results of our FOIA request–data from USAID that was not previously publicly available–we created an interactive data visualization that maps the global health projects involving US Fortune 500 companies and documents how much public and private money is given to each project. Our findings suggest that there may be more faith in a business-supported policy initiative than outcomes can justify. Still little is known about the impact of PPPs and the implications for relying on corporations — with their own profit-seeking agendas — to improve global health.
