Oil and Africa. Boon or bust? In CGD’s first Global Prosperity Wonkcast I interview senior fellow Todd Moss on his innovative proposal for managing Ghana’s anticipated $1 billion per year oil windfall: money to the people.
My colleague Ruth Levine has recently posted on a new study by Stephen Lim and colleagues at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation of the discrepancies between vaccination rates from two sources: those obtained officially from governments and those estimated directly and unofficially from household surveys from the same countries.
When word came last week that Allan Rosenfield, former dean of Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health and longtime champion of women's health, died after an extended illness, a wave of sadness washed over the many thousands of us around the world who have admired Allan and been inspired by his public health heroism.
A regional workshop on Pay for Performance (P4P) in Asia will be held in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India from January
XDR-TB, the widely untreatable, mutated manifestation of TB, is spreading; that much is known. Unknown is how much is out there, and how fast it is growing. Between 1996 and 2006, TB cases rose nearly 30%. One-fifth of new cases are resistant to at least one of the drugs available, as my colleague, Rachel Nugent, points out in the most recent issue of Foreign Policy.
*This post is a contribution from HIV/AIDS Monitor research partners in Mozambique, Dirce Costa and Eleásara Antunes, Austral Cowi Ltd
Mozambique's response to HIV/AIDS was weak or deficient throughout the past year.
-Susan Hume, the manager of World Bank programs in Mozambique, Sept 2008
This was the unfortunate verdict from a joint review by the World Bank and Government of Mozambique of the performance of World Bank HIV/AIDS programs in the country. The meeting, called a Country Portfolio Performance Review (CPPR), was held from 17 to 18 September in Maputo and reviewed the implementation of all World Bank programs in Mozambique, including the Multi-Country AIDS program (MAP) that began in 2003 and is due to end in December 2009.
In the scale used for this review, the MAP program was rated as poor overall due to weak financial management, program implementation (disbursements), procurement and monitoring and evaluation. This represents a worsening of the situation since the previous CPPR in March of 2008, with this program area being the only one in the World Bank's Mozambique portfolio to be rated as a "problem project."
The poor progress on HIV/AIDS is not necessarily a surprise to the Bank, as we can see in the last WB Mission Appraisal (not publically available, so we have included excerpts here) undertaken to supervise the HIV/AIDS Response Project conducted in close coordination with the Common Fund partners.
Congratulations are due to Richard Greene, who directs USAID's Office of Health, Infectious Diseases and Nutrition, recently recognized as the "Federal Employee of the Year" for his work as one of the architects and leaders of the President's Malaria Initiative. According to the award announcement, "Greene's dedication and leadership were critical to the program's early success.
A story in last week's Washington Post by David Brown provides strong support to my assertion that global public health is a booming business on campuses. Last week the CGD web-site featured a Q&A with me on our proposal that the next President create a Global Health Corps as one way to expand domestic and international volunteer activities.
The Times of South Africa recently reported the recall of two TB drugs, manufactured by Pharmascript, after the national health department found them to be substandard. Initial tests at the local WHO laboratory found they did not contain the needed amount of active ingredients, as claimed on the label, and concluded that they "would most likely not have effectively treated 'thousands' of TB patients."
