Global Health Policy

The latest effort to address aid coordination problems and health system issues – the Health System Funding Platform (the Platform) – is evolving slowly and beginning to recreate the same traps it was supposed to solve. In a paper released this month, Bill Savedoff and I show how the natural tendency for aid agencies to fall back on measuring and paying for inputs is likely to undermine the Platform’s goals. Linking funding to results is the most promising way for the donors to achieve the aims they initially set for the initiative.

I am pleased to announce that Amanda Glassman joins CGD today as the new director of CGD’s Global Health Policy program and a CGD research fellow. Amanda was chosen from a crowded field of highly qualified candidates, and I am delighted to welcome her to CGD.

This is a joint post with Katherine Douglas.

A new Lancet paper by a team of researchers at the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation has caused quite a stir about the progress we are making towards Millennium Development Goal (MDG) 5: To reduce maternal mortality ratios by three quarters from 1990 to 2015! I have long wondered why no one was making an effort to question the ostensibly stagnant “500,000 maternal deaths per year” estimate, so this team’s effort to provide us with the new numbers (and reinvigorated focus!) is very welcome. With a few exceptions (Karen Grepin’s excellent blog being one), I have yet to see much of a response from the global health community, although there has been quite a lively discussion in the development community at large (see Bill Easterly’s blog for example) about differences in modeling outcomes, whether these new maternal mortality numbers are better than the older ones and whether these new figures indicate the efficacy of safe motherhood programs, among other topics. However, two important issues are missing from these conversations: The extreme limitations of existing maternal mortality data, and what we can take away from these new estimates.

When it comes to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, no sliver of the international development community is more enamored than the sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) crowd (yes, that’s their self-designation). Last Friday, Hillary returned the love. In a speech (see the full text here) in the regal Benjamin Franklin reception room at the State Department, Secretary of State Clinton and many of her top staff brought the international dimension of reproductive health and family planning in from the cold. It’s been a long winter.