Gates Foundation Withdraws Anti-Smoking Funding

Scandal has rocked the Bill and Melissa Gates Foundation, which offers grants to charitable and health related organisations, after it came out that the chairwoman of one of their project partners, the International Development Research Centre in Canada, has links to a tobacco company.

Barbara Mcdougall, formerly external affairs minister in the Canadian government, was working with the foundation on stop-smoking research and tobacco control programs in Africa. However it has emerged that until last month, she sat on the board of Imperial Tobacco Canada.

Since then, the foundation has announced that it is withdrawing the remaining funds from its initial grant, worth $5.2 million.

The Gates Foundation was first alerted to the issue by the African Tobacco Control Alliance. The Alliance, who are based in Togo and have been organising some of the research program, were set to co-host a conference with the International Development Research Centre but announced they were pulling out after discovering about Ms. Mcdougall’s links to Imperial.

Their chairwoman, Rachel Kitonyo, said that the constitution of the ATCA forbids the group from working with anyone with direct or indirect links to the tobacco industry and that they never work with partners who do so.

In a statement, she said “This is a clear conflict of interests and we find it deplorable.”

The scandal puts the future of the stop-smoking program in jeopardy at a time when it is becoming apparent that anti-smoking initiatives are sorely needed in the continent. As smoking rates fall in the Western world and governments pour money into treatments like nicotine replacement therapies and Champix to encourage the population to quit smoking, tobacco companies have increasingly been turning to Africa as the next big source of income.

A report issued jointly by the American Cancer Society and the Global Smokefree Partnership has warned that if current trends continue, tobacco use in more than half of all African countries will double in the next 12 years.

While certain countries have introduced stringent anti-smoking laws and are encouraging the public to quit smoking, both through advertising campaigns and by making NRT and medications like Champix and Zyban more available, many are still lagging behind.

The Gates Foundation project funds a large number of stop-smoking programs and studies within the US and abroad. In an email message to African alliance members, a program officer for the foundation wrote, “We are deeply disappointed by this revelation and feel this conflict is unacceptable as we work to support meaningful tobacco control programs in Africa.”