Category: 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.

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…

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…

This Op-Ed first appeared in Global Health Now. [caption id="" align="alignnone" width="850"] The line begins at dawn in Myameyamu, Zambia for a monthly clinic that provides the only essential medical services for miles. Image: © 2012 Malcolm Spence/On Call Africa, Courtesy of Photoshare.[/caption] The global health community is gathering this week in Astana, Kazakhstan, to mark the 40th anniversary of the 1978 Alma Ata conference on primary health care. This time around, primary health care is being framed through the lens of universal health coverage (UHC). While everyone agrees that UHC is the right aspiration, the term has come to mean all things to all people, a catch-all with multiple proposed interpretations. The problem with this fuzzy language is that, without specificity, UHC risks being an empty promise. What does UHC mean, exactly?…

One of our key research interests at The Center for Policy Impact in Global Health is studying how money flows through the global health “system.”  We are interested in questions such as where does global health financing come from, through which channels does it flow, where does it end up, and how is it used?  There is an enormous financing gap to achieve the ambitious health-related Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)—one study suggests that an additional $371 billion is needed annually across low- and middle-income countries—and the tracking of finance flows is critical in knowing whether the gap is being closed.  Just meeting the child and maternal health targets in SDG3 alone is estimated to require an additional $33 billion annually. In recent months, along with our colleagues at Open Consultants…

This blog was originally published as part of the Future Development blog series of the Brookings Institution on October 5, 2018. The original version can be found here. Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 3—ensuring healthy lives and promoting wellbeing for all—is accompanied by a very ambitious set of targets. These include ending avertable child deaths and ending the epidemics of AIDS, tuberculosis (TB), malaria, and neglected tropical diseases by 2030. Are these achievable or can they be dismissed as just a “fairytale”? ARE THE TARGETS ACHIEVABLE? Researchers have tried to answer this question using two complementary approaches. The first is to look at recent trends in death rates and then extrapolate these trends forward to 2030. The second is to model what would happen if today’s health interventions—such as medicines, vaccines, insecticidal…