Sir Richard George Andrew Feachem, KBE, FREng (born 1947) is Professor of Global Health at both the University of California, San Francisco, and the University of California, Berkeley, and Director of the Global Health Group at UCSF Global Health Sciences. He is also a Visiting Professor at the University of London and an Honorary Professor at the University of Queensland.
From 2002 to 2007, Sir Richard served as founding Executive Director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria[1] and Under Secretary General of the United Nations. During this time, the Global Fund grew from scratch to become the world's largest health financing institution for developing countries, with assets of US $11 billion, supporting 450 programmes in 136 countries.
From 1999 to 2002, Professor Feachem was the founding Director of the Institute for Global Health at UCSF and UC Berkeley. From 1995 until 1999, Dr. Feachem was Director for Health, Nutrition and Population at the World Bank.[2] Previously (1989–1995), he was Dean of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.[3] Professor Feachem served as Chairman of the Foundation Council of the Global Forum for Health Research; Board member and Treasurer of the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative; Council Member of Voluntary Service Overseas; and on numerous other boards and committees. He was a member of the Commission on Macroeconomics and Health[1], and the Commission on HIV and Governance in Africa. He has worked in international health and development for 40 years and has published extensively on public health, health policy and development finance.
Professor Feachem holds a Doctor of Science degree in Medicine from the University of London, and a PhD in Environmental Health from the University of New South Wales. In 2007, he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Engineering by the University of Birmingham. He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and an Honorary Fellow of the Faculty of Public Health Medicine of the Royal College of Physicians and of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. In 2002, he was elected to membership of the Institute of Medicine of the US National Academy of Sciences. Sir Richard was knighted by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II in 2007.[4]
In October 2007, Sir Richard founded "The Global Health Group" within UCSF Global Health Sciences. The Global Health Group is an “Action Tank” dedicated to bringing major new paradigms in global health through to large scale action. This entails analysis, policy formulation, and consensus building, followed by intensive collaborations with individual developing countries to achieve large-scale application of the new ideas. The Global Health Group is supported by grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and ExxonMobil.
The first topic that the Global Health Group has taken on is malaria elimination, focusing on elimination from the endemic margins inwards. Under Sir Richard's leadership, a global Malaria Elimination Group (MEG) has been established. MEG had its first meeting in California in March 2008, its second in South Africa in October 2008, and its third in Switzerland in April 2009. The next meeting will be in Hainan, China, in December 2009. MEG has recently published two seminal documents: Shrinking the Malaria Map: A Prospectus on Malaria Elimination and Shrinking the Malaria Map: A Guide on Malaria Elimination for Policy Makers.
In parallel, the Global Health Group has been collaborating intensively with seven malaria elimination countries; Botswana, China, Namibia, Solomon Islands, South Africa, Swaziland, and Vanuatu. The Global Health Group, in collaboration with the Australian Government, the University of Queensland, and WHO will launch the Asia Pacific Malaria Elimination Network (APMEN) in Brisbane in February 2009,[5][6] which will bring together 10 eliminating countries from the region.
The second front of Feachem's Global Health Group is a health systems initiative, focusing on Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs). A large conference on this subject was organized at Wilton Park in April 2008, and work is continuing with collaborating countries to launch new and innovative PPPs. Of particular interest is the model now known as the Public-Private Investment Partnership (PPIP) in which governments enter into partnerships with private consortia to finance and rebuild major health infrastructure and to provide clinical services over a period of decades.
The Global Health Group has joined with the Government of Lesotho to showcase the pioneering PPIP in that country and has just published its report and an Overview on PPIPs. A second model of special interest to the Global Health Group is Social Franchising. The first Compendium on this topic was recently published by the Global Health Group.
Dr. Feachem lives in Alameda, California, with his wife Neelam Sekhri Feachem, the CEO of the Healthcare Redesign Group.