The unfinished agenda of maternal and child health in Africa and Asia: Promising directions to address maternal mortality challenges

Latest News from the Center, Policy Blog, Stories from Africa Seminar Series
Blog by Ekene Osakwe, Ipchita Bharali, and Dr. Megan HuchkoThis blog summarizes the discussion and key takeaways from the webinar that was hosted on April 22, 2022 as part of the Asia-Africa Health Initiative Seminar series. Click here to view the live recording of the seminar. BackgroundNo woman should die from childbirth. Although global trends in maternal mortality from 2000 to 2017 show a 38% reduction in the maternal mortality ratio (MMR), the agenda to eliminate preventable deaths in mothers and children on the African and Asian continents is still unfinished. Low- and middle-income countries contribute 99% of global maternal deaths for women aged 15-49 years. Maternal mortality has remained unacceptably high with 297 000 deaths occurring in 2017 alone. Sub-Saharan Africa and Southern Asia contributed 86% of the global maternal…
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How do global health academics “reach the people”?

Latest News from the Center, Policy Blog
Today, at the Triangle Global Health Consortium annual conference, our Center Director Gavin Yamey was a panelist on a panel called “Reach the People: How to Communicate Global Health Issues and Solutions.” Below, we post his 10-minute panel presentation. In the next 10 minutes, I’m going to try and answer the question: How does a global health academic like me “reach the people”? I’m taking a bit of liberty in thinking about who “the people” are.  I direct a global health policy center at Duke, and for us our key engagement is with a broad array of policymakers – global health funders, foundations, ministries of health and finance, NGOs, and so on. We want our analytic work to influence the conversations, the debates, the dialogue among these global health actors.…
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Measuring the gap between ability and effort in domestic revenue mobilization

Latest News from the Center, Policy Blog
This blog was first published in Brookings Future Development Blog. The authors, Ipchita Bharali and Indermit Gill have authored a policy brief and a report "Enhancing domestic revenues: constraints and opportunities" available for download here. Developing countries should expect foreign aid to fall during the transition from low to middle income, and end soon after. In low-income countries, the share of foreign aid is about 2.5 percent of GDP. This drops to 0.8 percent in lower-middle-income economies; by upper-middle-income levels, it is a negligible 0.2 percent. For both givers and receivers of foreign assistance, one of the main concerns is that foreign aid weakens the incentives to build domestic revenue administration capacity and make sensible tax policy choices. The stakes can be high. Even a pre-announced and gradual reduction of foreign…
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A Roadmap for Ending the Moral Catastrophe of TB

Latest News from the Center, Policy Blog
This Op-Ed was first published in GLOBAL HEALTH NOW of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The Op-Ed focuses on the release of the report by the Lancet Commission on Tuberculosis, the challenges and opportunities ahead to end TB. The good news is that tuberculosis deaths are declining steadily. The bad news is that we are wildly off track to meet the bold targets set for controlling the world’s #1 lethal infectious disease. The Sustainable Development Goals call for a 90% reduction in TB deaths by 2030. And the WHO’s End TB strategy calls for a 90% reduction in TB incidence by 2035. Yet at current rates of decline, a 90% reduction in TB incidence probably will not be achieved in in India until 2124 or in Uganda until 2134, for example. Such…
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Is trade with India changing Africa’s health care landscape?

Latest News from the Center, Policy Blog, Stories from Africa Seminar Series
This blog was first published in Brookings Future Development Blog and is part of an ongoing series of blogs based on the Stories from Africa Seminar Series that concluded in November 2018 at Duke University. Two of the authors, Siddharth Dixit and Chinmoy Kumar, along with Indermit Gill, have authored a related recent paper "Are Economic Relations with India Helping Africa?" available for download here. African countries face numerous challenges in health services, from severe shortages of health care professionals to weak leadership and governance to limited infrastructure and resources to self-imposed policy barriers. In recent years, trade in the health sector has provided some solutions, such as eHealth (the use of information and communication technologies for health) and mHealth (the use of mobile devices for health). But there is still a long way to go…
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Stories from Africa: Closing Africa’s health financing gap

Latest News from the Center, Policy Blog, Stories from Africa Seminar Series
This blog was first published in Brookings Future Development Blog and is part of an ongoing series of blogs based on the Stories from Africa Seminar Series that concluded in November 2018 at Duke University. The Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) health targets are extremely ambitious. They call for ending the epidemics of AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria and neglected tropical diseases, and preventable deaths of newborns and children below 5 years of age by 2030. Achieving these targets will require large sums of money. Karin Stenberg and colleagues estimate that among 67 low-income countries (LICs) and middle-income countries (MICs)—representing 95 percent of the population of all LICs and MICs—the annual financing gap to reach the SDG health targets is more than $370 billion. About half of these countries are in sub-Saharan Africa, where the…
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Stories from Africa: Achieving Health Gains on the Way to Universal Health Coverage

Latest News from the Center, Policy Blog, Stories from Africa Seminar Series
This blog was first published in Brookings Future Development Blog and is part of an ongoing series of blogs based on the Stories from Africa Seminar Series that concluded in November 2018 at Duke University. Health leaders and policymakers around the world have a shared interest and commitment to achieve universal health coverage (UHC) by 2030. Health systems are responding to increased demand due to population growth, aging populations with complex conditions, or prior commitments to achieve UHC. Despite health gains in the last 20 years, problems are particularly acute in Sub-Saharan Africa. As economies grow to middle-income levels, they have to tackle communicable diseases while more people are living with non-communicable diseases like diabetes and hypertension. The burden of disease may be higher in low-income economies, but the complexity of…
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Always the Bridesmaid…

Latest News from the Center, Policy Blog
The following article was originally featured in the December 2018 issue of  The Medicine Maker magazine. The complete December 2018 issue of the magazine can be found here. You can download the PDF version of this article here ( Article_Always the Bridesmaid) Author: Gavin Yamey ( @GYamey) is the Director of the Center for Policy Impact in Global Health and a Professor of the Practice of Global Health and Public Policy at the Duke Global Health Institute.
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Intensified multilateral cooperation on global public goods for health: three opportunities for collective action

Latest News from the Center, Policy Blog
Through a number of collaborative projects with partners such as SEEK Development, UCSF’s Evidence to Policy Initiative, Open Consultants, and Spark Street Consulting, The Center for Policy Impact in Global Health has been studying the “global functions” of donor financing for health. By global functions, we mean collective action activities that address transnational health challenges. These activities can be categorized as (i) global public goods (GPGs), e.g., knowledge generation and sharing, or product development for neglected diseases; (ii) control of negative regional and global externalities, e.g., pandemic preparedness, and (iii) global health leadership and stewardship, e.g., global convening to build consensus. In one study led by our colleague Marco Schäferhoff, we found that there is substantial underinvestment in this critical area: only one-fifth of all donor financing for health targets…
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What is Essential Universal Health Coverage?

Latest News from the Center, Policy Blog
In a new report written by the Lancet Commission on Investing in Health (the CIH), launched at last week’s Alma Ata at 40 meeting, the CIH draws on evidence from the third edition of the Disease Control Priorities (DCP3) to define essential universal health coverage (EUHC). DCP3 was a 7-year international collaboration that synthesized evidence on the most effective way to tackle priority health conditions in low-income countries (LICs) and middle-income countries (MICs). A key output of DCP3 was a set of 21 essential packages of interventions, each one aimed at a different health priority (e.g. reproductive health, pandemic preparedness).  As the CIH notes in the Alma Ata at 40 report: “Interventions were included in these 21 packages if they provided good value for money, were feasible to implement in…
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