New ideas for raising money for medical care—and spending it

IN THE old days, the job of eradicating disease fell to governments and inter-governmental bodies. Then charities, often led by celebrities or entrepreneurs, joined in. Finally, in the Western world at least, governments accepted the need to pool their efforts with those of private donors, big and small. The effort still seems unequal to the task. Every year, nearly 11m children die before the age of five because of a mixture of poor nutrition and preventable disease. Many of the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals (calling, for example, for a plunge in child and maternal mortality by 2015) look unattainable.

The good news is that more imaginative ways of raising and spending money are now on the horizon. How well they do will depend on many details—like the quality of information flowing between poor places and the governments, firms and individuals that want to help. …