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While far short of the $1 billion goal Kolfage had set, or the $5 billion President Trump was demanding from Congress, it quickly became the second-highest earning campaign in the history of the popular crowdfunding site GoFundMe. In less than a month, the most prominent campaign started by Brian Kolfage had raised more than $18 million. Citizens turned to crowdfunding while President Trump shut down the government over the absence of legislative support for border wall funding.
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Three months later across the Atlantic, far-right supporters of US President Donald Trump began several crowdfunding campaigns to fund a fortified wall between the USA and Mexico, aimed at deterring and preventing migrants-many of them intending to claim asylum-from reaching US territory.
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Given that Harare’s failure to provide adequate water supplies to residents was suspected as the cause of the outbreak, the crowdfunding appeal appeared to many as an “irresponsible, insensitive and indefensible act”. Exhausted by years of corruption, financial mismanagement, and poor public services, Zimbabweans quickly lashed back. Rather than informing citizens about preventative measures or treatment centers, Ncube’s tweet asked them to contribute funds to the national response: “Together with my colleagues at Min of Health, we have set up an auditable emergency crowdfund to further efforts to fight cholera to date,” he wrote. In September 2018, a frenzy broke out on Twitter as Zimbabwe’s recently-appointed Finance Minister Mthuli Ncube put out an emergency message to citizens regarding the country’s cholera outbreak. More analysis, and better access to data, is needed to inform policy and address crowdfunding as a source of health disparities. Rather than viewing crowdfunding as a social media fad or a purely beneficial technology, researchers and publics must recognize it as a complex innovation that is reshaping health systems, influencing health disparities, and shifting political norms, even as it introduces new ways of connecting and caring for those in the midst of health crises. Resultsĭrawing on empirical data and case examples, this article describes three main ways that crowdfunding is impacting health equity and health politics around the world: 1) as a technological determinant of health, wherein data ownership, algorithms and platform politics influence health inequities 2) as a commercial determinant of health, wherein corporate influence reshapes healthcare markets and health data 3) and as a determinant of health politics, affecting how citizens view health rights and the future of health coverage. Data are drawn from a mixed-methods analysis of medical crowdfunding campaigns, as well as an ongoing ethnographic study of crowdfunding platforms and the people who use them. To map and document how medical crowdfunding is shaped by, and shapes, health disparities, this article offers an exploratory conceptual and empirical analysis of medical crowdfunding platforms and practices around the world. But research on medical crowdfunding, particularly in global health contexts, has been sparse, and accessing robust data is difficult. Crowdfunding in its current manifestations can be seen as an antithesis to universal health coverage. The popularity of such “medical crowdfunding” is fueled by health disparities and gaps in health coverage and social safety-net systems. The use of crowdfunding platforms to cover the costs of healthcare is growing rapidly within low-, middle-, and high-income countries as a new funding modality in global health.