Publications

Donor spending on global health has surged, yet for many poor people in developing countries even basic prevention and treatment remain elusive. CGD’s newest book, Performance Incentives for Global Health: Potential and Pitfalls, shows how modest payments in cash or kind can get more health from health care spending. Informed by case studies and the Working Group on Performance-Based Incentives, co-authors Rena Eichler and CGD vice president Ruth Levine tell how to design and implement effective incentive programs—and what to avoid.

CGD vice president Ruth Levine suggests specific actions for the Obama administration to take for the impact of the White House Council on Women and Girls to extend beyond U.S. borders.

Faced with many urgent challenges, the next U.S. president may be tempted to let global health issues bubble along on the back burner and simply allow reasonably well-funded programs that garner bipartisan support to continue unchanged. This would be a mistake. Instead, the president should set an ambitious course to improve global health by leveraging the full range of U.S. assets to create a more just and safe world.

This essay by CGD director of communications and policy Lawrence MacDonald and senior fellow and vice president for programs and operations Ruth Levine describes a variety of approaches and techniques that the Center for Global Development has used to achieve its mission: applying the results of rigorous research and policy analysis to help improve the policies and practices of the rich world towards development. It outlines an emerging 12-step program that the Center's staff has applied successfully in a variety of policy contexts, with particular attention to how the Center has tracked the impact of these initiatives. The essay concludes with suggestions for improving the field of policy advocacy impact evaluation more broadly.

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In 2004 a working group of experts was convened by the Center for Global Development to identify cases in which large-scale efforts to improve health in developing countries have succeeded—saving millions of lives and preserving the livelihoods and social fabric of entire communities. Seventeen of these cases were originally captured in CGD's enormously successful book Millions Saved: Proven Successes in Global Health. This brief is based on the new edition of the book, titled Case Studies in Global Health: Millions Saved published by Jones and Bartlett in 2007, which documents three new successes in Nepal, Chile, and India, and updates to the 17 original success stories.

Achieving better health in poor countries depends in part on giving companies that produce drugs, vaccines and diagnostics incentives to invest in their production by improving their ability to forecast which products will be purchased by whom in what quantities. This brief reviews the findings of CGD's Global Health Forecasting Working Group, which was convened in early 2006 to study the challenges surrounding demand forecasting, and offers recommendations for better forecasting, including the creation on an "infomediary" to mobilize, coordinate and disseminate information about product demand.

This paper analyzes the use of incentives (money, food and other material goods) for patients and healthcare providers to improve tuberculosis detection and treatment. It finds that although managing the distribution of money and food can be complicated, performance-based incentives do work. It ends with suggestions for improving future programs.

Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) programs are one way to create incentives for poor people to use preventive healthcare services. Evaluations show that CCT programs work, and their use is spreading rapidly throughout the developing world. This paper analyzes key features of CCT programs and offers practical advice for their future design.