There is understandable outrage over the United Nation’s reaction to its role in first creating and then denying responsibility for Haiti’s cholera outbreak in 2010 that killed 8,000 people. But last week another UN cholera denial story garnered less attention, this time in Zimbabwe following a UN tribunal ruling in Nairobi.
Migration from poor countries to rich countries can change people’s lives. A doctor-founded startup is exploring how migration can save people’s lives.
Bono appeared at the TED event this week to discuss ending global poverty. He suggested that it was possible to imagine eradicating $1.25 a day poverty by around 2030. And I believe him –at least in my more optimistic moments. The U2 frontman noted one of the benefits if that happened: “you won’t have to listen to an insufferable jumped-u
Amanda and I wrote before the New Year about the tragic violence against vaccination workers in Pakistan who were doing vital work in the struggle to completely wipe out polio worldwide. Their deaths were linked to allegations that the CIA had used a vaccine campaign as part of intelligence gathering operations in the country. I’d like to propose a specific policy action by the US government that might marginally reduce the risk of such attacks –and their knock-on effect in terms of more k
Although President Obama will be plenty busy during the remainder of his first term working with Congress to avoid the fiscal cliff, he need not wait until the start of his second term to further his vision for making US policy more supportive of global poverty reduction.
In this post, Gabriel Demombynes, Senior Economist in the Nairobi office of the World Bank, describes some of the issues raised at the Center for Global Development and the African Population & Health Research Center’s first meeting of the Data for African Development Working Group meeting last month. This blog was originally posted to the World Bank’s Development Impact Blog on October 1, 2012.
by Gabriel Demombynes
Recently I attended the inaugural meeting of the Data for African Development Working Group put together by the Center for Global Development and the African Population & Health Research Center here in Nairobi. The group aims to improve data for policymaking on the continent and in particular to overcome “political economy” problems in data collection and dissemination.
When the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria was created in 2002, it was intended to combat the global burden of these diseases while simultaneously delivering aid in new, innovative ways. In 2012, an increasingly austere budget climate has added pressure for the Global Fund to explore new approaches to global health financing and generate better “value for money"—a top concern to global health donors, who want the biggest bang for their buck in terms of lives saved and epidemiological progress.
This is a joint post with Heather Lanthorn, a doctoral candidate at Harvard School of Public Health.
In mid-July, amidst the busy global-health month of July, in between the Family Planning summit and the AIDS conference, the near-final draft of the independent evaluation of the Affordable Medicines Facility - Malaria (AMFm) was released.
Christmas came early this year for the wonkiest of PEPFAR-watchers. Our gift: the preliminary report on the pilot of PEPFAR’s Expenditure Analysis Initiative, an important and exciting move by PEPFAR towards evidence-based decision making and greater transparency.
This month, both Health Affairs and the Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (JAIDS) released special thematic issues on the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) in which the articles – mainly commentaries but some analyses – provide an exceptionally positive readout on PEPFAR’s past performance and future direction. In principle, this is great – any insights into PEPFAR are always welcome, and it’s clearly valuable to discuss and disseminate lessons learned from the program. If these articles were posted on the PEPFAR website, or released as official PEPFAR reports, we wouldn’t bat an eye. But within scientific, peer-reviewed journals, the articles read more like PEPFAR PR rather than commentary and analysis from independent, third-party observers and stakeholders. A quick skim of the titles in the table of contents illustrates this point (see word cloud of selected title excerpts), and a closer look at the contributors sheds some light on why this may be the case: most authors of the articles are somehow affiliated with PEPFAR or with organizations that have received money from the program.