One of the particularly entertaining keynotes at the Social Impact Exchange conference was given by Dan Heath, co-author of Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard. He spoke about “finding the bright spots” or looking for what is working instead of what is not working. One of his examples was “positive deviance“, a theory for social […]
I spent the last three days in New York City attending the Social Impact Exchange’s inaugural conference on scaling. The theme was “Taking social innovation to scale” and boasted an impressive line-up of speakers and participants, including Robert Steel, Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, Judith Rodin, Nancy Roob, and David Gergen. Over the next few days, I’ll be […]
A few months back, I noted the shocking statistics on tuberculosis, highlighting that one-third of the world’s population are infected and 1.7 million people die from the disease each year. This month’s tuberculosis (TB) conference, held in Durban, South Africa, highlighted the need for integration of TB and HIV care. I met Prof Harry Hausler, the chair […]
The NYTimes has written a vivid account of how the US approach to tuberculosis care has changed as the disease has virtually been eradicated. They describe the last TB sanitorium, which still exists in Florida “where strangers live together for months with boredom, pills, pain, contemplation and the same ancient disease that killed George Orwell, Franz Kafka […]
Foreign Policy’s, The Cable, has some clues on the USAID revamp, released in an email to USAID employees yesterday. They write: USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah is moving ahead with his promise to give the agency back its capability to think strategically by building an official policy planning staff. “This new bureau, bolstered by the agency’s […]
Women Deliver, held this week in Washington, DC, has opened with a bang – a $1.5 billion pledge over 5 years from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation focusing on maternal and child health. The NY Times writes: “Ms. Gates said much of the next $1.5 billion would go to programs in India, Ethiopia and […]
Interesting excerpts from what I’ve been reading this past week. It’s a bit of a mixed bag, but there is one theme that I detect: behaviour is integral to the maintenance and promotion health…but it’s hard to predict, hard to control and hard to change: Dan Heath at Fast Company gives us some reasons, and they don’t include lazyness. He explains that […]
Tomorrow marks the opening of Women Deliver 2010, the largest conference on women and maternal health, held June 7-9 in Washington, DC. Speakers will include UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon, Christiane Amanpour, Helene Gayle, and Melinda Gates, among others. The 2007 conference brought together more than 2000 participants from 115 countries, and brought emphasis to the importance of […]
Karin Grepin, one of the best global health bloggers in my humble opinion, has written a very personal account of the recent birth of her son. Her reflection on her experience deserves a read, in particular the paragraph below: I kept asking myself: what if I lived in a poor country, was a poor woman, and knew […]
Continuing on from my post about data sources a few weeks ago…Pia Christiansen at Covering Health has posted a wealth of links to new and existing initiatives for making community health data as accessible and “as useful as weather data”. Google and Microsoft go head-to-head with applications that fuse maps and data – check out Fusion Tables […]
President Obama’s new national security strategy, released yesterday, outlines a security approach that is as much about development as defense. The linking of development to national security marks the Administration’s greater reliance on soft power – in these lean years, a possibly more cost-effective and politically palatable approach to the previous strategies released by the Bush Administration in 2002 and […]
Highlights from my reading this week… The Council on Foreign Relations has released a working paper on “The Challenges of Global Health Governance“. Viewed in the context of recent rumours about USAID reform and last week’s release of the White House’s National Security Strategy, I think the paper is likely to generate significant discussion. They write: “…these questions about governance […]
The spotlight is on Africa as South Africa gears up for the launch of the continent’s first World Cup, opening June 11th. To shed some of that light on global health, a few reports have been released this week highlighting the progress and challenges of African social and economic development. The Africa Progress Panel, chaired by former UN Secretary General […]
Yesterday, I very cynically posted about the success in reducing child mortality rates that has been achieved since 1990. Gap Minder (a site that has kept me entertained for hours) has a graph that shows child mortality falling – watch it, I promise you won’t be disappointed.
$4.1 trillion. That’s how much the world spends on health annually, which, if you divide by an estimated 6 billion people on planet earth, works out to a bit more than $650 per person. The United States spends the most per capita on health at a little more than $6000; Burundi is the lowest at just under $3 per person. […]