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Posted Mon, 21 Jan 2019 22:16:07
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Please note, the LSHTM seminar will not be taking place on Tuesday 22nd January as advertised, but will be taking place on Thursday, 24nd January instead.
Apologies for any inconvenience caused,
Annelieke
Please join us for the first seminar of our LSHTM Medical Anthropology Research Seminar Series of this spring term,
on Thursday 24nd January from 4-5 pm in the Jenny Roberts room, LSHTM, 15-17 Tavistock Place, London WC1H 9SH.
Dr. Susan Erikson, Associate Professor, Medical Anthropologist of Global Health, Faculty of Health Sciences, Simon Fraser University, Canada ([log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>)
'Global Health Reckoning: The 'Ebola Bond', Impact Development Bonds, and the Growth of Speculative Finance in Humanitarian Health Aid'
As small government and austerity campaigns continue to wreak havoc on health services worldwide, there is increasing interest in capital market instruments designed to 'make suffering profitable.' The aim is to recruit private investors - high-wealth individuals and institutional investors - to mitigate the funding gaps created by government drawdowns implemented since the 1970s. In rich and poor countries alike, 'impact' instruments are being introduced to tackle difficult health, education, and social challenges. In my talk, I focus on the growth of financial instruments for health. I present the logics of a new financial instrument for emergency pandemic response promoted by the World Bank and the World Health Organization, the colloquially named 'Ebola Bond'. Based on multi-sited ethnographic research in global financial institutions as well as on-the-ground with mobile enumerators in Sierra Leone, I show how serious health risk management decisions are now actively informed by investor sensibilities. Catastrophic health forecasting, re-insurance, and extreme mortality modeling are now central to the financing of pandemics. Additionally, I explain how health data plays a key role in financial payout, constituting the 'trigger' that either fund a response or make money for investors. Long-held notions of using data for project and program account-ability are still operative but invest-ability has become an adjuvant and decidedly more lucrative use of health data, continuing a trend first sparked in 2010 by the Gates Foundation. Analyzing these financial instruments may well assist us in assessing desirable and undesirable global health financing futures. What kind of global health financing do we want? With what kind of financing will we be complicitous in the future?
Key Words: Global Health, Data, Financialisation, 'Ebola Bond', Profitable Suffering
UPCOMING SEMINARS:
Tuesday 19 February 2019 - Prof Jeannette Pols, Socrates professor 'Social Theory, Humanism and Materialities', University of Amsterdam ([log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>).
Making sense with numbers. Unraveling practices of self-quantification.<https://www.lshtm.ac.uk/newsevents/events/jeannette-pols-making-sense-numbers-unraveling-practices-self-quantification>
Tuesday 19 March - Prof James Fairhead, Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Sussex ([log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>).
Is the Ebola reservoir in people? A critique of the idea of 'Patient Zero' and 'spillover' in the narration and comparative analysis of Ebola epidemic origins, and its implications.
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