Bonds issued by new super charity

Finance | 1 Dec 2006

The International Finance Facility for Immunisation, a new charity that could become one of the UK's largest in terms of income, has issued its inaugural bonds.

IFFIm is a new international development institution designed to accelerate the availability of funds to be used for health and immunisation programmes through the GAVI Alliance in 70 of the poorest countries around the world. It was registered as a charity with the Charity Commission in June and hopes to raise US$4 billion over the next ten years.

The GAVI Alliance is an alliance of all the major stakeholders in immunisation and it is estimated that more than 1.7 million early deaths will have been prevented as a result of support by GAVI up to the end of 2005. Its success in the past five years has led six European nations (UK, France, Italy, Norway, Spain and Sweden) to make legally-binding commitments to IFFIm. Using those commitments, IFFIm anticipates raising significant sums of money in the international capital markets to support GAVI's health and immunisation programmes in developing countries.

Although bond finance has been used by the Wellcome Trust and Mencap in the past, Pesh Framjee, head of charities at Deloitte, auditor and adviser to IFFIm, said the sheer scale of the IFFIm scheme pointed the way to the future of using the capital market as an innovative and effective form of fundraising. 'Not all the investors are doing it for altruistic reasons but because it is a good investment. However, by engaging these people with the sector, hopefully they will be donors in other areas in the future.'

Directory: Charity Commission | Mencap | Wellcome Trust

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