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Independent research & practical ideas for global prosperity
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Independent research & practical ideas for global prosperity
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Global Health Policy
IFFIm’s Borrowing Costs Lower than Most Donor Governments?April 19, 2011By Amanda Glassman in Global Health Tags: GAVI, IFFIm, World Bank
Following my blog on vaccine financing last week, there were questions on the financing costs of the International Finance Facility on Immunization (IFFIm). In 2005, when the instrument’s final design was still uncertain, Todd Moss questioned here whether the extra financing costs were justified. To answer this question, Quinton Ng of the GAVI Alliance compared IFFIm’s borrowing costs to donor governments’ borrowing costs: Read More… Comment »From DC to NYC: Promoting Recommendations for a More Effective UNFPAApril 18, 2011By Rachel Nugent in Global Health Tags: Babatunde Osotimehin, ICPD, International Conference on Population and Development, Rachel Nugent, UNFPA
CGD is well known in Washington for convening smart and interesting people for good discussions. We don’t have much track record in New York, so I wasn’t sure what to expect when we trekked up to the United Nations last week to release our new report on UNFPA (the UN Population Fund). (The release coincided with the annual meeting of the Commission on Population and Development so we reached visiting country delegations, as well as year-round diplomats.) CGD’s past reports to agencies undergoing leadership changes (to UNAIDS, the World Bank, Global Fund, and others) have been received enthusiastically both for their technical advice, as well as their political value in stimulating a focus on reform. Mostly, I hoped the transplantation of good discussion about important policy issues would take hold. We had a great line-up starting with Professor David Bloom of the Harvard School of Public Health, one of my co-chairs on the CGD working group that looked at UNFPA on the occasion of its recent leadership transition. David presented our motivation for the report and the working group recommendations. My other co-chair, Dr. Jotham Musinguzi, who heads the Africa regional office of Partners in Population and Development, then talked about the way UNFPA operates in countries. After all, the vast majority of its resources are in country offices, so that’s the true test of its effectiveness. Panelists Jill Sheffield, president of Women Deliver, and Jonna Jeurlink from the DFID mission to the UN talked about their perceptions of UNFPA as a partner and as a recipient of funds, respectively. Comment »Vaccine Financing: Assessing Progress and Envisioning Future DirectionsApril 8, 2011By Amanda Glassman in Global Health Tags: Amanda Glassman, GAVI, Vaccines
This is a joint post with Katie Stein. As the GAVI Alliance gears up for its pledging conference in June, a CGD panel reflected on progress and lessons learned in financing GAVI since 2001 and explored implications for the next decade. Speakers had first-hand experience in the design and implementation of the major vaccine financing instruments—Alice Albright, former CFO of GAVI; Michael Kremer, co-chair of CGD’s Advance Market Commitment (AMC) Working Group; Helen Evans and David Ferreira, GAVI; and Amie Batson, Deputy Assistant Administrator for Global Health at USAID. Key takeaways from the event are directly below, and a longer summary—with embedded video clips—is below that. You can also watch a full recording of the event here. 1 Comment »Pakistan’s Health Ministry to Be Abolished. Then What?April 6, 2011By William Savedoff in Global Health Tags: Pakistan
Yes. Pakistan is planning to abolish its Health Ministry in July. When I first heard this news, I couldn’t believe it. Alarm bells went off in my head. What about disease surveillance? Who will enforce drug quality regulations? What does this mean for polio eradication? Is bioterrorism something that provinces can handle? Is it possible for a country with limited human resources to split public health policy across four or more different administrations? Upon further inquiry, I heard a number of reasons for abolishing the health ministry – all of which were related to concerns over the most effective way of delivering health care services. The main argument I heard was that health care services would be more effectively managed and delivered by provincial governments that are closer to and more responsive to their citizens. I won’t go into the extensive debate over decentralized health care delivery because my primary concern right now is: what happens to public health functions related to regulation, supervision, information, and standards? Read More… 11 Comments »Drug Resistance Gets Its Day… Again. Will This Time Be Different?April 5, 2011By Rachel Nugent in Uncategorized
World Health Day is April 7. Who remembers the theme of World Health Day 2010? Never mind. If you read any major media in the past week, you almost couldn’t escape knowing that World Health Day 2011 is about antimicrobial resistance (AMR), or drug resistance (here’s a link to an example from The Economist.) At least the World Health Organization’s (WHO) public relations machinery is ramped up. And they want us to be alarmed. Here’s a quote from WHO: Read More… 1 Comment »WHO’s Real & Urgent Crisis: Its Role in a Changing WorldApril 1, 2011By Nandini Oomman in Global Health Tags: WHOOn March 23rd, Richard Horton, Editor, The Lancet, “tweeted” a series of 140 character messages in rapid fire about the World Health Organization (WHO) that caught my eye:
Tweets from the editor of a high impact factor global health journal aren’t easily ignored (and I reproduced here with his permission), especially when they alert readers to an urgent crisis. Read More… Comment »Really Amanda? Really?March 28, 2011By Amanda Glassman in Global Health Tags: Oxfam
In the middle of night, in a moment of indignation, I wrote a blog post on a report issued by Oxfam and a group of NGO partners on the health system in Ghana. I have since been duly chastised by Duncan Green and others. It’s pretty clear that my overheated rhetoric distracted from an important debate about health care in Ghana and more broadly about the role of evidence for policy change in the health sector. I also erred in not taking proper note of the Ghanaian NGOs that contributed to the report. Though the media portrayed the report as being from Oxfam, I am now clear that this report was co-sponsored and should not be seen only as “the Oxfam report.” I deeply apologize to Oxfam and its partners and to our readers for the tone of my post. I should have dialed way back on the snark. Mea culpa. That said, I am sticking to my guns on substance. Read More… 5 Comments » |
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