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Peter Singer

Peter Singer

Adjunct Professor of Medicine at University of Toronto, former CEO of Grand Challenges Canada, and former Special Advisor to the Director-General of the WHO.

Aug 10, 2026

1:13
Let's talk about Grand Challenges Canada and what that's all about, and then we can, we can explore further from there.
1:20
Yeah.
1:20
That's terrific.
1:21
And, uh, also still a board member of Grand Challenges Canada, and it is, uh, it is, um, the... something I feel very, very proud of.
1:32
And, uh, you know, it's 15 years old, and I think the seminal accomplishment of Grand Challenges Canada is it's established that innovation is a key path in international development, and that seemed to be, uh, kind of a strange idea 15 years ago when we started.
1:55
But now, especially with the retrenchment in funding in development assistance, uh, which is dropping like a stone, uh, and in global health generally, uh, actually innovation is a promising path forward, maybe the most promising path forward for, uh, international development.
2:17
So Grand Challenges Canada, um, over those 15 years, uh, has supported about 1,700 innovations in more than 100 countries, uh, based on more than a billion dollars of, uh, inputs, um, about half of which, or a little more than half of which has come from the government of Canada, um, and hence the international development aspect of it.

8 MINS LATER

10:27
Um, does that happen exclusively in Toronto and other major cities? Is it happening in a sort of, um, dispersed manner, distributed manner?

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