Under the Big Tree by Ellen Agler

Author:Ellen Agler [Agler, Ellen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781421427232
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 2019-01-15T07:00:00+00:00

Unless I have a flight to catch, I don’t like to get out of bed before dawn, but at 6 a.m. on January 30, 2012, I was at home in Norfolk, Virginia, livestreaming the London Declaration on Neglected Tropical Diseases. Side by side onstage were Bill Gates; the director-general of WHO, Margaret Chan; the CEOs of major pharmaceutical companies Eisai, GlaxoSmithKline, Merck KGaA, MSD, and Sanofi; ministers of health from Mozambique and Tanzania; and officials from the World Bank, DFID, USAID, and the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation. The London Declaration was a landmark commitment by these stakeholders, who pledged to dedicate money, resources, and drugs to reach disease-reduction targets recently set by WHO; to work at all levels and across health, education, water, sanitation, and hygiene sectors; and to provide annual progress reports. Never had NTDs reached this high a profile or received this much global attention. The mood in the room, I heard later, was euphoric.

At the time, I was working for Operation Smile, an organization I loved and had served for many years as it grew from a small NGO working in a few countries to a large network with local ownership operating in more than sixty countries, providing surgery and follow-up care to thousands of children with cleft lips and cleft palates. When a recruiter called and encouraged me to apply for the END Fund’s CEO position, I hadn’t been looking for a job. But I was intrigued by the possibility that I could contribute to helping hundreds of millions of people. I decided to explore the opportunity.

My first interview for the position was scheduled for a few days after the London Declaration, so I was watching the livestream not just out of curiosity but as research. I had been reading every book about NTDs that I could find. My deep dive became a bit of a joke after I was offered the job; I was teased that I was the only candidate who could explain—or even pronounce—the diseases.

Watching the London Declaration announcement was a personal turning point, transforming a tentative interest in joining the END Fund into being completely inspired by the global collaborative approach and the big vision for ending NTDs. At the Harvard School of Public Health, a professor had asked my class, “How can you keep asking, at every step of your work, are you doing the greatest good for the greatest number of people?” I hadn’t ever imagined that I might contribute to something that would improve the lives of more than a billion people, but by the end of the livestream, I was hooked.

In London that day, Bill Gates said: “There’s a history, a very proud history of involvement [and] donations, and many of the [disease] burdens have come down. But in fact, they haven’t come down nearly far enough. What’s unique about today is getting everybody on the same page.”

Sir Andrew Witty, CEO of GlaxoSmithKline, said: “What you are seeing in the announcement today is a variety of commitments across

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