A new grant from The Helmsley Charitable Trust provides critical support to East Africa’s Visceral Leishmaniasis Program
The emergency grant provides targeted support for urgent diagnostic and treatment supplies for tens of thousands of patients.
The Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust provided a two-year $1.375 million emergency grant to the END Fund in support of a program for visceral leishmaniasis, one of the top parasitic killer diseases, coordinated by the World Health Organization (WHO) in nine eastern African countries.
The grant will notably address an urgent funding gap, allowing WHO to procure essential visceral leishmaniasis diagnostic tests and first-line drugs for Ethiopia as well as neighboring or regional countries of Chad, Djibouti, Eritrea, Kenya, Uganda, Somalia, Sudan, and South Sudan, ensuring diagnostic equipment for approximately 68,000 people and treatments for more than 32,000 people.
Visceral leishmaniasis is one of the most fatal and outbreak-prone neglected tropical diseases. East Africa bears 73% of the global burden. Children under the age of 15 make up more than 65 percent of all those infected with the disease. This parasitic disease, transmitted by female sandflies, presents significant diagnostic challenges due to its symptom overlap with conditions like malnutrition and malaria. Furthermore, effective treatment can be difficult to access, and without timely treatment, symptomatic visceral leishmaniasis has a fatality rate of up to 95%. With treatment, the survival rate is more than 98%.
Although the annual number of visceral leishmaniasis cases is comparable to the number of children who die of HIV each year, and despite its higher mortality rate than malaria, it is an invisible disease with limited support from the global community. Visceral leishmaniasis is one of the most neglected of all neglected tropical diseases.
The grant from the Helmsley Charitable Trust fills this critical funding gap to ensure the continuity of the program. If treatments were to stop, it is estimated that more than 20,000 people would die annually from the disease.
“Without this generous grant from the Helmsley Charitable Trust, entire communities would be lacking the tools to detect, treat, and stop the spread of this deadly parasitic disease,” said Dr Solomon Zewdu, CEO of the END Fund. “If case finding and treatments were to stop, the parasite would spread unchecked, resulting in increased transmission, lives lost and entire regions at risk. This grant is a powerful example of collaborative philanthropy at work: it seamlessly complements the collective effort to address a specific gap that the pooled resources did not reach and ensures this life-saving work continues and scales to reach all those in need—with of course the attainable goal of these programs to become unnecessary as elimination is reached.”
“WHO is grateful to the END Fund and The Helmsley Charitable Trust for their financial contribution which will enable procurement of diagnostic tests and first-line medicines, as well as the implementation of visceral leishmaniasis elimination activities in high-burden countries in eastern Africa,” said Dr. Daniel Ngamije Madandi, Director a.i., Department of Malaria and Neglected Tropical Diseases at the World Health Organization in Geneva. “All nine countries in the eastern Africa endemic region have signed the Memorandum of Understanding on visceral leishmaniasis elimination as a public health problem, a strong political commitment to eliminate this fatal disease affecting poor and disadvantaged populations in remote rural areas.”
This grant marks the Helmsley Charitable Trust’s first direct investment in visceral leishmaniasis programming and builds on significant historical investment toward the reduction of neglected tropical diseases. Most recently, in 2024, the organization granted $6.3 million to support efforts to end trachoma in Ethiopia.
The END Fund launched its visceral leishmaniasis programming in 2021 in response to foreign aid cuts, mobilizing a coalition of philanthropists, NGOs, Ministries of Health, and WHO to address urgent needs. This collaborative funding model created a pool of resources to be directed toward essential care, including early detection to reduce the chance of death, life-saving treatments, and strengthening systems to advance progress toward a future free from the disease. However, in the current environment of funding cuts, the future of the program was not certain.
“With the progress that the END Fund, the WHO, and their partners have made toward eliminating visceral leishmaniasis for communities in East Africa, we cannot risk an interruption to the program, or worse, a rebound of the deadly disease,” said Walter Panzirer, a Trustee of the Helmsley Charitable Trust. “Helmsley is committed to working with public and private partners to accelerate efforts to combat this neglected tropical disease. The time to act is now, because everyone deserves a chance at a healthy future.”
Implementation of funding is already underway and will run through the middle of 2027. This investment builds on existing grants in support of visceral leishmaniasis elimination efforts made by ELMA Philanthropies at $8.45 million and the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF) at over $9 million; CIFF’s contribution is matched at 10% by the UBS Optimus Foundation via the END Fund, at $900,000 over three years.
Together with global and regional partners, this investment helps chart the course toward a future where preventable and treatable diseases like visceral leishmaniasis no longer claim lives simply due to lack of resources.
