Violaine Mitchell

Director, Health Funds and Partnerships, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Violaine Mitchell oversees a team that works to empower country governments to sustainably finance and manage their primary health care systems.

Before joining the foundation in 2010, she worked as the coordinator of the Gavi Financing Task Force under contract to the World Bank, where she was responsible for coordinating Gavi’s early work on national financial sustainability planning and global innovative financing. Earlier, she worked at the Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences, where she was the study director for a study on the Children’s Vaccine Initiative and assistant study director for the IOM Study on Malaria Prevention and Control.

Ms Mitchell spent a number of years working on integrated community development projects, including three years working with traditional refuse collectors in Cairo, Egypt, on child health, animal health and production, and income generation projects funded by Catholic Relief Services, Oxfam, and UNICEF, among others.

Ms Mitchell is the cofounder of Small Farm Canada, an award-winning national Canadian magazine for small-scale producers. She has a B.A. in development studies from Brown University and an M.Sc. in tropical public health from the Harvard School of Public Health.