Rendez-vous 168 - May 15, 2007
I had sent a series of questions to Kelly Henning of the Bloomberg Initiative to Reduce Tobacco Use so that we can understand better how it operates.
Matt Myers took to the task: " Kelly forwarded to
me the questions you posed to her. As one of the
Bloomberg grantees I volunteered to respond because each of us involved
with this effort want to be sure that we all do everything inform the
community about this extraordinary initiative and the opportunities presented by
Mayor Bloomberg's generosity and commitment to reducing the number of people who
die from tobacco use."
On behalf of the Campaign for
Tobacco-Free Kids, I am happy to answer.
Please do not hesitate to let me know if you have
additional questions.
Q1. The organization and the management of the Initiative remains -at least for me- mysterious. Could you tell us how it is structured, who the principal staff members are, how it works?
The initiative partners include the World Lung Foundation, the World Health Organization, the Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and the CDC Foundation.
The Bloomberg Foundation has a core staff that works on the Initiative.
More specifically, the Initiative seeks to reduce tobacco use by promoting the following proven policy focused strategies:
1) Tax tobacco to increase price, and also prevent smuggling;
2) Change the image of tobacco by banning direct and indirect advertising and conducting hard-hitting anti-tobacco public education campaigns;
3) Protect nonsmokers from exposure to other people's smoke; and
4) Help smokers quit.
The Key Components of the Initiative are:
1) support public sector efforts to implement the key interventions listed above;
2) support advocates' efforts to educate communities and to encourage policy change;
3) rigorously monitor the status of global tobacco use and countries' progress implementing key interventions; and
4) optimize tobacco control interventions.
The initiative has set as its priority the problem of tobacco use in low/middle income countries, with the top focus on China, India, Indonesia, Russia, and Bangladesh which account for approximately half of the world's smokers, but it also seeks to support efforts in other low and middle income countries
Each of the major grantees will also have a primary focus to guide their efforts.
The World Lung Foundation will
1) implement a grant program to increase capacity of organizations to implement in-country tobacco control measures;
2) create a global resource center for effective anti-tobacco advertisements;
3) support the FCA in its effort to promote measures to prevent tobacco smuggling; and
4) operate up to 4 Regional Centers on tobacco control.
The Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids will
1) create a Global Advocacy Resource Center including resources for advocacy, legal support, and to improve public information about tobacco and the tobacco industry; and
2) implement a grant program to support in-country tobacco control advocacy efforts.
The World Health Organization will
1) provide global, regional and in-country leadership in tobacco control; and
2) monitor global tobacco control policy implementation at country level.
The CDC Foundation will measure the current burden of tobacco and status of tobacco control in high burden low and middle income countries through creation of a global adult tobacco survey.
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health will
1) expand training and economic studies, with particular focus on China; and
2) analyze, refine and optimize tobacco control interventions.
The vast majority of the staff and the work is at the grantee level and each grantee is responsible for hiring its own staff. Not all staff have yet been hired.
Judith Mackay is taking the lead for the World Lung Foundation. Nils Billo, Jose Castro and Sinead Jones are taking the lead for the International Union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease. A number of people from the WHO are involved but Doug Bettcher in his new role at TFI is playing a major role. Charlie Stokes and Samira Asma are playing the lead role for the CDC Foundation. Jon Samet and Steve Tamplin are among those taking the lead for the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Laurent Huber is the main contact for the FCA.
Damon Moglen (Damon joined the Campaign in July 2006 with over 20 years of advocacy experience, including 15 years with Greenpeace International) Katie Kemper (Katie worked on tobacco for over 13 years for GlaxoSmithKline Consumer Healthcare) head our overall effort.
Patricia Lambert serves as the head of our International Legal Consortium. Patricia led the South African government's delegation to the Framework Convention negotiations and has continued to play a critical role in the next stages of the FCTC). Rose Nathan also is part of our legal team (Rose is a long-time tobacco control lawyer who has worked with a many of the major global organizations involved in tobacco control).
Lynn Sferrazza is the third member of our legal team (Lynn has 14 years of legal experience and has worked and has been involved as a lawyer providing assistance on legal reform/ democracy building in former soviet republics and Asia)
Ross Hammond heads up the grants program for CFTFK.
Adwoa Agyeman serves as our grants
administrator. (Adwoa worked most recently for the Moriah Fund in
Washington DC, where she managed the grant-making process for the
Women's Rights & Reproductive Health and Poverty programs).
Mark Hurley heads up our communications staff. (For six years, Mark served as a Senior Communications Program Officer for the World Wildlife Fund's Global Forest Program). Elaine Yin also works on communications (Elaine has worked with the public relations firm Fleishman-Hillard in China and the US and worked in the US as the project leader for the White House Office of National Drug Policy's National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign) as does Brian Bonner (Brian was a reporter for the Knight-Ridder syndicate who did four stints with Knight Ridder in the Moscow Bureau, where he filed stories on tobacco control and served on five missions with the Organization for Security and Cooperation as a senior member of election monitoring teams in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus).
Shoba John from Mumbai is working with us in India and Susan Lawrence is working with us on China Susan is a former journalist who spent a cumulative 11 years working as a staff correspondent in China, first for US News & World Report, then for the Far Eastern Economic Review and The Wall Street Journal.
Q2. The second round in the selecting process of the 100+ first proposals is over. People have received their email giving them the verdict. Can you tell us about the proposals? The ones that are in and the ones that are out (at least for now)?
Matt Myers: We received almost 600 project ideas from 68 countries in the first grant round.
One hundred ideas were invited to submit full grant proposals and we have selected 42 proposals from 22 low- and middle-income countries to enter contract negotiations.
The proposals include a wide range of activities including anti-tobacco advertising campaigns, strategies to improve legal enforcement of existing tobacco control laws, establishment and expansion of smoke-free places, program development and capacity building, and strategies to encourage tax and price increases.
When contracts are finalized the names of recipient organizations will be made public by the Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids and the World Lung Foundation, the two organizations that are operating the grants program.
In Round One the grants program gave priority to projects that were designed to lead to substantial, sustainable improvements in tobacco control laws, regulations, policies and programs, including (but not restricted to): tax and price measures, including anti-smuggling measures, establishment of smoke-free workplaces and public places, direct and indirect advertising bans, other evidence-based regulatory/legislative initiatives, and effective, long-term mass media campaigns and programs.
The grants program is NOT designed to fund basic research, academic studies, prevalence surveys or cessation services (unless they are integral to a policy initiative).
Systematic surveys of adult prevalence are being undertaken separately with the support of the Bloomberg Initiative and do not form part of this grants program.
For information on Round two potential grantees should go the website for the grant program www.tobaccofreegrants.com
Q3. Where stands the project about a clearinghouse for media campaigns? How does it -eventually- fit with existing repositories like UICC-Globalink's Multimedia Center or the CDC Media Campaign Resource Center? Considering the media campaigns have been mostly produced in the "Western world" don't you think there is a risk that they are culturally inadequate for many countries? Could it be more effective to help the production of new original media campaigns by local talent? After all there is plenty of experience in Bollywood and Nollywood.
Matt Myers: The clearinghouse for media campaigns is not a responsibility of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids: it is being overseen by the International Union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease.
They will be in a better position to answer your questions as to the status of those efforts.
The Initiative is convening an expert panel of persons from around the world with experience in developing, running, and evaluating anti-tobacco public education campaigns.
This effort is seen as complementary to other's efforts, such as those you noted, but with a particular emphasis on identifying the highest quality materials that would be most suited to adoption by low- and middle-income countries.
The project is being carried out in close connection and cooperation with the media repositories that already exist. Everyone recognizes that this effort needs to be culturally appropriate and take into account the situation in-countries.
The expert panel will include persons who currently live and work in selected countries.
Producing new media campaigns is not impossible but is very expensive and requires significant work to produce appropriate materials that result in the desired effect - this is not part of the Initiative's first step in this area but it has not been ruled out in the future.
A first step is to make available the best, culturally-relevant materials and provide technical assistance.
Q4. Promoting graphic warnings on cigarette packs (and inserts inside the packs) appears to be a very cost effective way to communicate about smoking. A few countries have already adopted them but most have not moved. Does the Initiative plans to support the adoption of graphic health warnings?
Matt Myers: The initiative supports the adoption of graphic health warnings on cigarette ads and packages.
The Initiative is prepared to support a broad range of anti-tobacco messaging. Pack warnings are also a potentially important modality to address illicit trade in tobacco and could potentially be supported through proposals in this area as well.
The goal is to fund projects that are designed to advocate for and promote the adoption of strong health warnings at the country level.
Q5. Money is certainly necessary and
welcome to fund effective tobacco control projects. How do you address the
risk of disruption one could fear when there is a sudden influx of
funds while no money at all or very little was previously available? I
read that all the $125 had to be spent within two years. Isn't that a
very tight schedule and what happened in 2 years from now, if/when the
funding is "gone"? What are the main objectives the Initiative aims
to achieve within this period?
Matt Myers: The initial project is for a two year period. The expectation is that if rapid progress can be demonstrated, additional funds are likely to become available to extend the duration of the project.
The Bloomberg grantees are sensitive to the possible impact of this influx of new funding and are being careful to insure that it boosts current efforts and doesn't displace them.
It is also working closely to use these funds to increase the sustainability of organizations and support efforts that have the potential to reduce tobacco use over the long run.
The new funds provide an extraordinary opportunity to engage tobacco control efforts in low and middle-income countries that have only previously been possible in the most developed nations.
It is expected that the funds will bring about change but that the change will significantly increase the impact of tobacco control efforts.
As we all know, currently 14,000 people are killed by tobacco every day, a strong and powerful tobacco industry spends billions annually to ensure that ever larger numbers of adults and children become addicted, and unless urgent action is taken the number of people killed by tobacco will reach one billion in this century.
We believe that the Bloomberg Initiative, by providing crucially needed funds at an opportune moment, has the potential to catalyze progress toward shared tobacco control goals.
As I noted earlier the main goals of the Initiative are to use proven key interventions to
1) support public sector efforts to implement tax increases and reduce smuggling, ban all forms of tobacco advertising, conduct hard-hitting anti-tobacco public education campaigns, protect nonsmokers from other people's smoke, and to help smokers quit;
2) support civil society's efforts to educate communities and advocate for change;
3) rigorously monitor global tobacco use and countries' progress and 4) optimize tobacco-control interventions.
Q5. Is there anything else you would like
to add?
Matt Myers: This single grant from the Bloomberg Family Foundation is more than double the total development aid for tobacco control. Other private and public donors are encouraged to join the initiative and to contribute to overcoming the enormous challenge ahead.
Q6. Are there contacts with the Gates Foundation as it has expressed its desire to start a tobacco control program? How do you envision the relationship between the Initiative and The Gates Foundation?
Matt Myers: I don't have any inside information about Gates. Everyone hopes that more philanthropists and government funders will step forward. We are prepared to work as closely as possible with other funders and other projects if it will promote everyone's joint goals.
Finally, there has been an effort to revise the grant website to be as clear as possible about the type of projects that are most likely to be favorably considered and to articulate what types of projects are less likely to be funded.
Thank you very much Matt for taking the time to answer our questions.
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