Rockefeller Foundation VP for Reimagining Humanitarian Nutrition Security Simon Winter tells the One Health Summit that we have more data than ever, but it’s too fragmented and should be unified.
Speaking at the One Health Summit last week on a panel called “Philanthropies for One Health, One Health for Children,” Winter explained that humanitarian data, food and nutrition data, climate adaptation data, and so on were too fragmented and siloed and should therefore be combined.
“We have more data than we’ve ever had in history and it’s increasingly becoming more affordable in its access, and yet it’s stuck in silos […] It’s very fragmented”
Simon Winter, One Health Summit, April 2026
“The humanitarian space has its own systems; then the development space has around food and nutrition systems has its own space; then the climate adaptation space has its own space and the financing that’s going down now is increasingly fragmented as well”
Simon Winter, One Health Summit, April 2026
Winter’s solution to the fragmented data echoed what Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison told former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair at the World Governments Summit in February 2025 — that all the data should be combined and shared between local and international “stakeholders.”
According to the Rockefeller Foundation exec, “We have a hugely complex problem, and yet the potential is there, so if we can rally together around making sure that local stakeholders […] are really empowered to have access to those global information products and combine those with local information products that are demanded and needed by local stakeholders, we can actually bring all this together in a very cost-effective and very impactful way.”
To back up his point about consolidating data about a country, Winter used Somalia as an example, which was going through a drought.
“One example from the Rockefeller Foundation right now as many of you may know, Somalia is yet again having a major drought, and we have recently funded a local tech incubator to setup a local food and nutrition systems dashboard, which will bring all these different data sets together to provide very timely information to communities, to organizations supporting those communities, and to international funders including the Somali diaspora, which remits about $2 billion a year of funds to Somalia to support those communities, those farmers, those pastoralists who are living on the front lines of their crisis.”
Winter’s words to unify data echo those of technocrats and globalists like Larry Ellison and Tony Blair.
In a one-on-one chat with Blair at last year’s World Governments Summit, Ellison called for the creation of a single, unified data platform for every country’s health data in order to feed AI systems and make governments more efficient.
The problem, according to Ellison, was that the data to train AI models was scattered across some 3,000 databases, and he believed they should all be unified under one, solitary database.
“All this [fragmented] information we have about our country […] We need to take that and unify that into a single database, so when we ask questions, the data model has all the information it needs to answer the question, discover the insight, and recommend an action”
Larry Ellison, World Governments Summit, February 2025
Just two weeks after Blair and Ellison spoke, the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (TBI) published a lengthy blueprint for the creation and execution of a National Data Library.
According to the report, “Governing in the Age of AI: Building Britain’s National Data Library:”
“The National Data Library (NDL) has the potential to become a vital piece of enabling infrastructure for public-service delivery and economic growth in the United Kingdom.
“It is intended to unlock the full potential of public-sector data by enabling secure, seamless, quick and scalable access to linked data sets.”
“None of this would be possible without efforts to improve the broader data infrastructure, including efforts around interoperability and digital identity”
Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, Governing in the Age of AI: Building Britain’s National Data Library, February 2025
According to TBI, “The UK should introduce a unique personal identifier to support accurate and efficient data linkage across public services […] A universal personal identifier, integrated with the GOV.UK Wallet app and associated credentials, will be necessary to deliver personalized services at scale.”
Digital ID is the linchpin for bringing all these datasets together, especially when it relates to data about individuals.
Image Source: Screenshot of Simon Winter via One Planet Summit YouTube channel
