Month: March 2019

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…

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…