Improving health outcomes depends on the infrastructure, human resources, and financing that contribute to an effective health system. A sound health system has the ability to dramatically curb the spread of disease, while one that is not securely financed or well managed can cripple a nation’s wellbeing. Improving health in developing countries can be accomplished in multiple ways and CGD’s work emphasizes innovative tools and mechanisms for providing health services to specific populations and for improving health systems in a range of settings.
Our work in this area includes:
Improving health outcomes depends on the infrastructure, human resources, and financing that contribute to an effective health system. A sound health system has the ability to dramatically curb the spread of disease, while one that is not securely financed or well managed can cripple a nation’s wellbeing. Improving health in developing countries can be accomplished in multiple ways and CGD’s work emphasizes innovative tools and mechanisms for providing health services to specific populations and for improving health systems in a range of settings.
Our work in this area includes:
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The Private Sector Advisory Facility Working Group recommends a practical way for donors and technical agencies to support successful public-private interactions to strenghthen health systems in developing countries.
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Before a 2006 UN Special Session proclaimed there should be universal access to antiretrovirals (ARV), the life-saving drugs were far too expensive for most people with AIDS. In a new CGD working paper, Ethan Kapstein and Josh Busby examine how activists transformed ARVs from expensive private goods into so-called merit goods—products that society agrees should be accessible to all. In a related blog post they discuss the implications of their analysis for AIDS and other global challenges.
READ THE BLOG | GO STRAIGHT TO THE WORKING PAPER
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Undernutrition kills more than three million mothers and children annually, and millions more children suffer irreversible, long-term damage to their bodies and minds. Yet nutrition is too often a low priority for rich-world donors and even for governments in the most affected countries. A new CGD essay by Ruth Levine and Danielle Kuczynski shows why and offers two practical suggestions for improvement.
READ THE ESSAY
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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. Eichler and Levine offer a quick overview in a Q&A.
Learn more
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Rena Eichler and Ruth Levine summarize the findings of their book, Performance Incentives for Global Health: Potential and Pitfalls. Through numerous case studies, they show that carefully designed and implemented performance-based incentive programs can improve developing country health care in many areas and strengthen overall health systems.
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This report by the UNAIDS Leadership Transition Working Group argues that the new executive director of the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS should focus on a few essential tasks: promoting evidence-based prevention and treatment strategies, ensuring that UN agencies adequately support countries severely affected by HIV, and pressing rich-country governments to live up to their pledges to help poor countries respond to the epidemic.
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Senior fellow Mead Over estimates the effect of AIDS on poverty in South Asia and analyzes public policy options to help the region’s predominantly private health care systems meet the challenge of treating AIDS. He finds that South Asian governments should play a larger role in AIDS treatment than in other aspects of health care, in the interest of both efficiency and equity.
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Throughout Latin America, mothers no longer worry about their children contracting polio; vast regions of Africa are now habitable because river blindness is under control; China has made major inroads against tuberculosis; in Sri Lanka, women can give birth without fear of dying—in sharp contrast to women in most poor countries of the world.
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The United States can play an important role in
promoting global development while simultaneously advancing
American interests and prosperity. Intellectual property (IP) rights, such as patents and
copyrights, provide protection against unauthorized copying and
are therefore fundamental to creating a policy environment
conducive for innovation. But this
protection creates challenges for developing countries by limiting access to needed products and by misaligning
incentives for innovation. The next U.S. president should come down clearly in favor of a new
policy that better balances public health needs in developing
countries with private incentives for innovative activities.
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U.S. spending on global AIDS is widely seen as a significant foreign policy and humanitarian success, but this success contains the seeds of a future crisis. Treatment costs are set to escalate dramatically and new HIV infections continue to outpace the number of people receiving treatment. Three bad options thus loom ahead for U.S. foreign policy: indefinitely increase foreign assistance spending on an open-ended commitment, eliminate half of other foreign aid programs, or withdraw the medicine that millions of people depend upon to stay alive. CGD senior fellow Mead Over provides another option: implementing a sustainable policy that concentrates on prevention in order to drastically cut new infections while sustaining the reduction in AIDS-related deaths.
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The White House and the World: A Global Development Agenda for the Next U.S. President shows how modest changes in U.S. policies could greatly improve the lives of poor people in developing countries, thus fostering greater stability, security, and prosperity globally and at home. Center for Global Development experts offer fresh perspectives and practical advice on trade policy, migration, foreign aid, climate change and more. In an introductory essay, CGD President Nancy Birdsall explains why and how the next U.S. president must lead in the creation of a better, safer world.
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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. Eichler and Levine offer a quick overview in a Q&A.
Learn more
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Large numbers of African nurses and doctors are emigrating to the U.S., U.K., Australia and other rich countries. These movements strain local health systems and deprive sick people of urgently needed care. Right? Think again. What if wages and working conditions in city slums and rural villages are so dismal that trained health workers are unwilling to work there, regardless of migration options? What if the possibility of migration actually causes more people in developing countries to train as health care workers? Drawing on a new database of health worker emigration from Africa, CGD research fellow Michael Clemens finds that the conventional wisdom about the impact of doctors and nurses migration is entirely wrong. Visas, he concludes, do not kill. Learn more
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The President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) is the single largest funder of global AIDS relief programs, but it does not regularly release data on how its money is spent. In this report, CGD's HIV/AIDS Monitor Team analyzes a newly available dataset of PEPFAR funding. They find, among other things, that only 30% of funds in 15 focus countries have gone to local organizations. They urge PEPFAR to regularly publish such funding data to improve transparency and strengthen coordination with host country governments and other stakeholders, and they suggest actions PEPFAR should take to improve the effectiveness and sustainability of its programs.
Learn More
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U.S. global AIDS spending is helping to prolong the lives of more than a million people, yet this success contains the seeds of a future crisis. Escalating treatment costs coupled with neglected prevention measures mean that AIDS spending is growing so rapidly that it threatens to squeeze out U.S. spending on other global health needs, even to the point of consuming half of the entire U.S. foreign assistance budget by 2016. Mead Over argues that AIDS treatment spending could quickly become a global entitlement since withdrawing funding for life-saving drugs would mean death for the beneficiaries. He offers suggestions for avoiding a ballooning AIDS treatment entitlement, including greatly stepped-up prevention efforts.
Learn More
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Donors spend billions of dollars to fight HIV/AIDS in developing countries, but poor integration between donors and host country health systems risks undermining international efforts to prevent and treat AIDS. In this analysis, CGD’s HIV/AIDS Monitor argues that donors need to pay more attention to their overall effect on health systems, finding that the big international donors often create duplicate AIDS-specific systems that competitively draw on the health resources of developing countries. The report recommends taking specific steps to more broadly improve health information systems, improve supply chain systems, and strengthen the health workforce.
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The Private Sector Advisory Facility Working Group recommends a practical way for donors and technical agencies to support successful public-private interactions to strenghthen health systems in developing countries.
-
The migration of doctors and nurses from Africa to rich countries has raised fears of an African medical brain drain. Research on the issue has been hampered by lack of data. How many doctors and nurses have left Africa? Which countries did they leave? Where have they settled? To answer these questions, CGD researchers compiled the first dataset of cumulative bilateral net flows of African-born physicians and nurses to the nine most important destination countries. Learn more
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Senior fellow Mead Over estimates the effect of AIDS on poverty in South Asia and analyzes public policy options to help the region’s predominantly private health care systems meet the challenge of treating AIDS. He finds that South Asian governments should play a larger role in AIDS treatment than in other aspects of health care, in the interest of both efficiency and equity.
-
Before a 2006 UN Special Session proclaimed there should be universal access to antiretrovirals (ARV), the life-saving drugs were far too expensive for most people with AIDS. In a new CGD working paper, Ethan Kapstein and Josh Busby examine how activists transformed ARVs from expensive private goods into so-called merit goods—products that society agrees should be accessible to all. In a related blog post they discuss the implications of their analysis for AIDS and other global challenges.
READ THE BLOG | GO STRAIGHT TO THE WORKING PAPER
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Michael Clemens, Research Fellow Research Fellow Michael Clemens leads CGD’s Migration and Development initiative. This work investigates how rich countries’ regulation of international movement by people from poor countries shapes the lives of the people who move as well as those who do not.
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Ruth Levine, Vice President for Programs and Operations, and Senior Fellow Ruth Levine is an internationally recognized expert on global health and health policy. She is a health economist with more than 15 years of experience designing and assessing the effects of social sector programs in Latin America, Eastern Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. In addition to serving as CGD's vice president for programs and operations, she leads the Center's work on global health policy, including chairing a series of working groups on key policy and finance constraints to the effective use of donor funding for health programs in low-income countries.
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Nandini Oomman, Director, HIV/AIDS Monitor, and Senior Program Associate Nandini Oomman joined CGD in March 2006 as the director of the HIV/AIDS Monitor, which tracks the effectiveness of the three main aid responses to the epidemic: the Global Fund, the HIV/AIDS programs of the World Bank, and the U.S. President's Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief (PEPFAR).
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Mead Over, Senior Fellow Mead Over applies economics and statistics in the search for more effective, efficient, and pro-poor health policies in developing countries. Among other topics, he is currently searching for paths the world might take towards a future in which AIDS will no longer be an important part of either the disease burden or the financial burden of any country.
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Partnerships with the Private Sector in Health
- Dec 4, 2009
The Private Sector Advisory Facility Working Group recommends a practical way for donors and technical agencies to support successful public-private interactions to strenghthen health systems in developing countries.
-
Making Markets for Merit Goods: The Political Economy of Antiretrovirals - Working Paper 179
- Aug 19, 2009
Before a 2006 UN Special Session proclaimed there should be universal access to antiretrovirals (ARV), the life-saving drugs were far too expensive for most people with AIDS. In a new CGD working paper, Ethan Kapstein and Josh Busby examine how activists transformed ARVs from expensive private goods into so-called merit goods—products that society agrees should be accessible to all. In a related blog post they discuss the implications of their analysis for AIDS and other global challenges.
READ THE BLOG | GO STRAIGHT TO THE WORKING PAPER
-
Global Nutrition Institutions: Is There an Appetite for Change?
- Aug 12, 2009
Undernutrition kills more than three million mothers and children annually, and millions more children suffer irreversible, long-term damage to their bodies and minds. Yet nutrition is too often a low priority for rich-world donors and even for governments in the most affected countries. A new CGD essay by Ruth Levine and Danielle Kuczynski shows why and offers two practical suggestions for improvement.
READ THE ESSAY
-
Performance Incentives for Global Health: Potential and Pitfalls
- Jun 15, 2009
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. Eichler and Levine offer a quick overview in a Q&A.
Learn more
-
Performance Incentives for Global Health: Potential and Pitfalls - Brief
- Jun 2, 2009
Rena Eichler and Ruth Levine summarize the findings of their book, Performance Incentives for Global Health: Potential and Pitfalls. Through numerous case studies, they show that carefully designed and implemented performance-based incentive programs can improve developing country health care in many areas and strengthen overall health systems.
-
UNAIDS: Preparing for the Future
- Mar 26, 2009
This report by the UNAIDS Leadership Transition Working Group argues that the new executive director of the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS should focus on a few essential tasks: promoting evidence-based prevention and treatment strategies, ensuring that UN agencies adequately support countries severely affected by HIV, and pressing rich-country governments to live up to their pledges to help poor countries respond to the epidemic.
-
-
Millions Saved: Proven Successes in Global Health Instructor Guide
- Jan 29, 2009
Throughout Latin America, mothers no longer worry about their children contracting polio; vast regions of Africa are now habitable because river blindness is under control; China has made major inroads against tuberculosis; in Sri Lanka, women can give birth without fear of dying—in sharp contrast to women in most poor countries of the world.
-
Tripping Over Health: U.S. Policy on Patents and Drug Access in Developing Countries (White House and the World Policy Brief)
- Nov 4, 2008
The United States can play an important role in
promoting global development while simultaneously advancing
American interests and prosperity. Intellectual property (IP) rights, such as patents and
copyrights, provide protection against unauthorized copying and
are therefore fundamental to creating a policy environment
conducive for innovation. But this
protection creates challenges for developing countries by limiting access to needed products and by misaligning
incentives for innovation. The next U.S. president should come down clearly in favor of a new
policy that better balances public health needs in developing
countries with private incentives for innovative activities.
-
Opportunities for Presidential Leadership on AIDS: From an "Emergency Plan" to a Sustainable Policy (White House and the World Policy Brief)
- Sep 5, 2008
U.S. spending on global AIDS is widely seen as a significant foreign policy and humanitarian success, but this success contains the seeds of a future crisis. Treatment costs are set to escalate dramatically and new HIV infections continue to outpace the number of people receiving treatment. Three bad options thus loom ahead for U.S. foreign policy: indefinitely increase foreign assistance spending on an open-ended commitment, eliminate half of other foreign aid programs, or withdraw the medicine that millions of people depend upon to stay alive. CGD senior fellow Mead Over provides another option: implementing a sustainable policy that concentrates on prevention in order to drastically cut new infections while sustaining the reduction in AIDS-related deaths.
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