Author: Joy Stutts

DURHAM, N.C. -- A new policy lab opening today at the Duke Global Health Institute will address financing solutions aimed at improving the health of the world’s poor. Specifically, the Center for Policy Impact in Global Health will focus on three significant gaps in global health financing: A gap in donor financing for research and development for poverty-related and neglected diseases, and for other “global functions” of health aid, such as pandemic preparedness. Global functions of aid are those that tackle issues that transcend national borders. Donor financing for health has flat-lined in recent years and too little of it has been directed at these global functions. A “middle-income gap,” which arises when countries cross an income threshold and no longer qualify for health aid. Most of the world’s poor…

The last few decades have seen an extraordinary transformation in global health outcomes. Nearly 7 million fewer children die each year today than in 1990.  Global average life expectancy has risen by six years over the same time period. Given this health progress, which was largely due to scaled up domestic and international health investments, should policymakers conclude that the time is now right to shift their investments away from health toward other sectors, such as climate or agriculture? That’s certainly an argument that some development experts have made.  But a new report that I co-authored with two of the Center’s collaborators, Dean Jamison and Naomi Beyeler at the University of California, San Francisco, with our colleague Hester Wadge at Imperial College London, argues that such a shift would be…