Why is collaborative philanthropy important in addressing mosquito-borne diseases and wider public health threats in Asia?
Mosquito-borne diseases do not respect borders, funding cycles, or institutional mandates. An infected mosquito does not pause at a national boundary, and an outbreak that begins in one country can seed transmission in three others before a single ministry has convened a response. The challenge is inherently cross-border, which means the response must be as well.
Asia bears this acutely. The region carries a disproportionate share of the dengue burden, with Southeast Asia alone seeing a 46 per cent jump in new cases between 2015 and 2019. The tools to address this exist, but what has been missing is a shared architecture for capital deployment and alignment that matches their potential.
No single government or institution can align scientific expertise and programme delivery across borders alone. Suppression and replacement programmes operating in the same region without a common plan can undermine each other. Surveillance data that does not connect to field operations loses the lead time needed to act.
Collaborative philanthropy brings the convening authority to close those gaps, and to hold a regional position that no single funder or government is structurally able to hold on its own. When funders operate under a shared plan, early commitments compound rather than sit in isolation, and the collective signal to governments is far stronger than any solo position could be.
Mosquito-borne diseases often require long-term, preventive, and community-based interventions. How can philanthropic capital support areas that may be underfunded by traditional systems?
A report we released with the Centre for Asian Philanthropy and Society at the Philanthropy Asia Summit 2026 found a consistent pattern across ten case studies: philanthropic risk capital underwrites the earliest and riskiest stages of innovation, then builds the evidence that draws governments and larger investors in behind it. Those ten cases collectively reached more than 210 million people in thirteen Asian economies.
The World Mosquito Program in Yogyakarta – one of the case studies in the report – is a strong example of this. The Tahija Foundation committed more than US$17 million over ten years to test Wolbachia-based dengue control when no government would fund it and no market existed for the result. The randomised controlled trial demonstrated a 77 per cent reduction in dengue incidence. The method is now in Indonesia's national health plan, protecting an estimated 14 million people, and operating in fifteen other countries.
Governments need proof before committing. Industry invests where returns are foreseeable. The gap between a promising result and a funded, ministry-approved programme is precisely where conviction-led capital earns its place.
What role can multi-sector partnerships play in scaling disease prevention initiatives across countries with different healthcare capacities?
Every country in the region is at a different point. Some have sophisticated genomic surveillance infrastructure. Others have strong community health networks but limited sequencing capacity. A multi-sector partnership lets each participant contribute where they are strongest, rather than every country building the full stack independently.
The Global Consortium Against Mozzies (GCAM) is structured around that reality. PAA convenes and aligns funders, while Temasek Foundation engages health ministries at a technical level and Temasek Life Sciences Laboratory contributes research depth and next-generation vector control development. Partners such as Institute of Philanthropy (IoP), Wellcome, National Innovation Center par Excellence (NICE), Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), and the Asia Pacific Leaders Malaria Alliance (APLMA) extend the consortium's reach without duplicating what its founding members provide.
Scaling also means acknowledging what cannot be standardised. Community adoption of vector control in Thailand will look different from adoption in Indonesia or the Philippines. The partnerships that embed community-rooted organisations from the outset will move faster than those that impose a single model from the top down.
How can philanthropy help bridge the gap between scientific innovation, public health implementation, and community adoption?
The gap between a scientific result and a community health outcome is rarely technical; the obstacles are structural. Translating a proven intervention into a national programme requires regulatory navigation, trained health workers, government buy-in, and sustained community engagement. Each step needs a funder willing to stay when commercial returns are unclear.
The World Mosquito Program in Yogyakarta, which I mentioned earlier, illustrates this. The Tahija Foundation's commitment did not end with the randomised controlled trial. Funding continued through implementation, extended even during Covid-19 when the work could easily have stalled. That sequence took more than a decade and required a funder willing to hold its position at every point where others would have stepped back.
Community adoption is consistently underestimated. When Singapore's 2020 lockdown disrupted vector control, dengue cases surged to over 32,000. Individual behaviour, at scale, shapes outbreak dynamics as much as any government programme. That community-level work sits between the incentives of every other actor. Conviction-led capital is often the only funding that reaches it.
What would success look like for this consortium in terms of measurable public health and regional resilience outcomes?
GCAM is at an early stage, and setting specific targets before the operational architecture is in place would be premature. What I can say is where we are pointing.
Success means health ministries receiving surveillance data on dengue serotypes before outbreak peaks, not during them, with suppression and replacement programmes in the same geography running from a coordinated plan, and vaccine and therapeutic deployment models designed for disease-endemic countries in Southeast Asia, not only markets where commercial returns are predictable.
At the system level, success is a region that is prepared rather than reactive. Vector-borne diseases cause more than 700,000 deaths annually, with the heaviest burden on communities across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The science to significantly reduce that burden already exists. GCAM's measure of progress will be how far it closes the distance between what the science can do and what actually reaches the people who need it.
