I can reassure you there are many things that keep me awake at night.
Also, I want to be clear. What I described was a very positive development globally, of which the Global Fund is a part. I did not claim that this was all just because of the work of the Global Fund. It is the work of an extraordinary movement over the last 15 years or so, which has made that possible, and we've been privileged to be part of that.
The challenges for the organization, if you're asking now about the functioning of the Global Fund as an organization, are still mainly the particular challenge of wanting to have a light touch. We are still an organization that has no country presence. We have no country offices in all these countries, and still we want to make sure that our investment is reaching the people.
There is a very high standard of accountability and often we cannot really follow that through from our headquarters in Geneva to the last mile, as we call it. It's not so difficult to reach the people in the capitals and the big hospitals. It's very difficult to reach the people in the rural areas, and that's where, in Africa, still most of the people live. So it's not only to make sure that the most vulnerable populations get their services, but also our donors, like yourselves, are expecting some level of accountability so that we can tell you how the money is being spent in those circumstances. That is not easy, unless we build up a huge machinery where we have our people everywhere.
We think we've found a way through engaging with partners at the local level, through engaging with what we call local fund agents, which we hire at the country level to report to us. That helps, but there is always this kind of dilemma of a global organization that has the mandate to have a light touch and keep the administrative costs down and still be accountable for the billions of dollars that we spend in many countries with very weak systems—not just health systems but financial systems.
That's our challenge, and that's, by the way, exactly where we want to engage the private sector. We are working now with several of the most well-known international banks and insurance companies to help us provide systems that provide a better oversight for these countries. They provide the teaching and financial accounting and risk management that we can apply at the global level. But if you go to Ghana, Uganda, and Sierra Leone, that's where they can be very helpful because they have the staff on the ground and they have the expertise and the technology that can help with that.