PATH awarded $1.5 million prize for humanitarian work
The Conrad N. Hilton Foundation has selected the Seattle-based global health organization PATH to receive the foundation’s $1.5 million Humanitarian Prize.
Stephen M. Hilton, the Hilton Foundation’s president and CEO, announced PATH’s selection today in Seattle.
Hilton said PATH was selected for its work developing and introducing new health technologies that have improved the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of disease in the developing world and for its work to improve health systems in resource-poor countries.
“PATH has adapted, developed or co-developed more than 85 technologies,” Hilton said. “These include such breakthroughs as vaccines, simple, easy-to-use diagnostics, and pre-filled injections so that people in the field can be easily trained to use them.”
These and other PATH initiatives are “having a profound impact on the health and quality of life of millions of men, women and children,” Hilton said.
The Hilton Foundation, which was created by the Conrad Hilton, founder of Hilton Hotels, awards the prize each year to an organization that is significantly alleviating human suffering.
Other recipients include the French medical relief organization Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors without Borders), the Danish International Center for Torture Victims, and the Virginia-based Operation Smile organization, which provides cleft lip and palate repair surgeries to children worldwide and trains local physicians in the techniques of repair.
The prize is the world’s largest given for humanitarian works.
PATH’s President and CEO Christopher J. Elias said the award “means a tremendous amount to the 850 PATH staff working around the world.”
Elias noted that developing affordable technologies that can be used in the developing world and introducing these technologies into health systems that are often weak and under-resourced can be a “decades-long process.”
“That’s a long road to run, and there aren’t that many markers along the way of recognizing the progress,” Elias said.
Elias said the award will be used to launch a five-year fundraising campaign to raise a $25 million to support innovative projects.
Currently, almost all of PATH’s $200 million annual budget comes from grants that must be spent on specific programs, restrictions that leave the organization with less than 4 percent of its budget for developing new initiatives, he said.
PATH uses these funds, which the organization calls its “innovation capital,” to explore and develop new ideas and programs, Elias said.
PATH hopes to use the money raised from the new campaign to take advantage of the explosion of new scientific discoveries to develop new technologies, to expand or “scale up” successful programs in the developing world, and to increase the number of offices and staff working abroad, particularly in subSaharan Africa, Elias said.
PATH currently has 32 offices in 20 countries. Among the technologies it has developed are:
- A heat-sensitive label that can tell a health providers whether a vaccine has been exposed to too much heat and is no longer effective.
- Easy-to-use injection devices that are pre-filled with the correct dose so they can be used safely by health workers with limited training
- Inexpensive “clean-delivery” kit to reduce risk of maternal and newborn infections during home births.
To learn more:
- Visit PATH’s Web site.
- Visit the Web site of the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation.
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Category: Global Health Seattle
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