IFFIm has been designed to accelerate the availability of funds to be used for health and immunisation programmes in 70 of the poorest countries around the world. By investing the majority of resources up front —“frontloading” — this innovative funding programme will increase significantly the flow of aid to ensure reliable and predictable funding flows for immunisation programmes and health system development during the years up to and including 2015.

It is expected to help prevent five million child deaths between 2006 and 2015, and more than five million future adult deaths by protecting more than 500 million children in campaigns against measles, tetanus, and yellow fever.

The Pope’s involvement with IFFm helped to transform the launch and ensure the success of the initiative.   It also showed that the Holy See is at the cutting edge of international development initiatives.  That was true again in February 2007, when at the launch of the Advanced Market Commitment – a programme to support R&D into finding vaccines for curable diseases which afflict mostly the Developing World – the Pope told Gordon Brown and his colleagues from Italy and Canada, “I assure you of the Holy See's full support of this humanitarian project, which is inspired by that spirit of human solidarity which our world needs in order to overcome every form of selfishness and to foster the peaceful coexistence of peoples”.

The pilot Advanced Market Commitment will focus on accelerating the development of a pneumococcal vaccine for the developing world, and is being supported by a US$1.5 billion commitment from donors.  Pneumococcal disease is currently responsible for more than 1.6 million deaths each year, half of these children.  A vaccine could save seven million lives by 2030.