Abstract
This piece explores some of the dynamics of global health crowdfunding by examining the work of Watsi, a highly successful crowdfunding platform that raises funds to cover the costs of medical care for patients in countries throughout the global South. While Watsi relies on a somewhat traditional formula for fundraising that uses individual patient stories to attract donations, its origins, aims. and values reflect an imagined (and perhaps, probable) future of global health partnerships. What relationships and connections are enabled in this future space? What subjectivities, anxieties, and values are brought to the fore by Watsi’s modes of work? And what forms of intimacy and estrangement are enabled by such connections and relations? Watsi represents, I argue, a new kind of ‘drone philanthropy’ that both disrupts and evokes older forms of partnership, affiliation, and connection among donors, organizations, and individual recipients of aid.
Highlights
When Chase Adam strode onto the stage at Y Combinator’s Start-up School in 2013, he looked like any other Silicon Valley techie or ‘thought leader’ (Sessions 2017), dressed in a dark T-shirt and sneakers
Adam had been invited to this forum because he runs what is described as the world’s most successful global health start-up, a crowdfunding platform that promotes and funds the medical needs of patients in other countries
With the help of ‘medical partners’ – nonprofit organizations, often founded or based in the global North, who provide medical services in countries in the global South – Watsi identifies patients in need of medical interventions, helps write patient narratives that will appeal to donors, and posts them to its online funding platform
Summary
Start-ups and nonprofits share a common faith in the power of origin stories. Watsi’s story, as narrated by Adam in his Y Combinator talk, portrays the organization as emerging from the disappointing, untrustworthy world of nonprofits and moving into the competitive, promising landscape of Silicon Valley. Adam’s narrative reflects many of the prominent suspicions and anxieties with which NGOs and governments involved in global health are regarded, and these mingle with the more personal anxieties and feelings of inadequacy that Silicon Valley’s success has projected for millennials who find themselves outside its gilded orbit Adam tells his audience that before he left San Francisco, he told ‘every single person I knew’ that he was ‘done with’ working for out-of-date NGOs and that he was no longer ‘going to sell my soul’. At this point in his talk he is interrupted by enthusiastic applause. This is the core disruptive innovation of its model, and it is worth exploring in more depth what this means for current and future global health models and partnerships
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