5 Oct 2026
Investing in health as a public good
A new $540 million, 10-year investment from the Gates Foundation will support IHME’s global public goods: the Global Burden of Disease study (GBD), forecasting of future health scenarios, and tracking of financing for global health. We discuss the investment with IHME Director Dr. Christopher Murray, including how GBD will expand to nearly 5,000 locations and why timely, local health evidence matters as global health funding declines.________________________________
Transcript:
Rhonda Stewart: Welcome to Global Health Insights, a podcast from IHME, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. I'm Rhonda Stewart. In this episode we'll hear from IHME director Dr. Chris Murray about a $540 million, 10-year investment from the Gates Foundation and what it means for health evidence as a global public good.
The investment will support IHME's three flagship research areas: the Global Burden of Disease Study, also known as GBD; IHME's future health scenarios forecasting platform; and its tracking of financing for global health.
Knowledge about what harms health, and what works to improve it, benefits everyone. Over the next decade, GBD will expand from about 925 locations to nearly 5,000, with estimates at the state or provincial level in every country. This more detailed view can reveal health disparities that national averages hide.
IHME's work is carried out with a network of more than 20,000 Collaborators in approximately 150 countries. IHME estimates have been cited in nearly 8,000 policy documents worldwide.
As an organization, we were recently incredibly fortunate to receive from the Gates Foundation a very significant grant to help continue our work and wanted to talk a little bit about that grant and what it's going to allow us to do. So why don't we start there?
Dr. Chris Murray: Yes, we're very excited that we received a $540 million investment, if you will, into the next 10 years of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. The purpose of that very large grant is to allow us to continue producing our three flagship what we call global public goods, and that's the global burden of disease, our future health scenarios forecasting scenario building platform, and our monitoring of resources for health, finance, and global health.
So it's a great endorsement of what we've been doing over the last 20 years, and we're looking forward to the exciting directions that these new resources can allow us to go.
Rhonda Stewart: When you say that health evidence is a global public good, what does that mean and why does that matter now more than ever since the GBD was first launched in the 1990s?
Dr. Chris Murray: So public good is a term that actually comes out of economics. It's the idea, for example, that there are things where my enjoyment of something does not affect your enjoyment of it. So the classic one that, that students are taught in university or high school is a park. A park is a public good because you can enjoy the park, I can enjoy the park. It's not like eating food where the person who consumes the food means that somebody else doesn't consume the food.
In a similar way, building up knowledge and evidence about what are health problems and what works to solve those health problems is also a public good. Because if we learn that information, then one community can use that, and another community can use it, and a third, and a fourth, and a fifth, and on and on because it's knowledge and my use of that knowledge does not decrease your ability to use that knowledge.
So that's where this language around public good comes from. And you know, it's a useful idea because the other thing that economics tells us about is that for public goods, unless somebody comes along, a government or another organization, a philanthropy, and funds public goods, everybody will tend to say, well, I'm not going to pay for that because somebody else is also going to benefit. And so I'm going to wait for the ot
