Global Health Best Buys
It’s a moral imperative that money spent on global health be used as effectively as possible to prevent and treat diseases and save lives. But sound investments in global health are defined in many ways: a cost-effective commodity or technology, a well-trained health workforce, or an evidence-informed policy. This event will convene experts from implementing agencies, governments, researcher institutions, and the private sector to discuss and debate what makes a “best buy” in global health.
The first panel will explore the enabling elements that help health interventions succeed – such as a favorable regulatory environment, a functioning health system, political will, and donor support – and debate why interventions have succeeded in some contexts and not others. The second panel will highlight examples of specific global health interventions being deployed by donors and governments, and discuss why – or why not – they are a good investment based on considerations of innovation, health impact, cost-effectiveness, and sustainability.
This event is being held in partnership with PSI, PATH, and Devex and will mark the launch of the Spring edition of PSI’s Impact Magazine, “The Best Buys Issue: Where to Invest in Global Health in 2014.” This program was also supported by a grant from Merck, through its Merck for Mothers Program.
Panel 1: The Value of an Enabling Environment - What Makes an Investment Successful?
- Amanda Glassman, Director of Global Health Policy, CGD (moderator)
- Karen Cavanaugh, Director, Office of Health Systems, Bureau for Global Health, USAID
- Karl Hofmann, President and CEO, PSI
- Nicole Klingen, Sector Manager, Health, Nutrition and Population, World Bank
- Kaakpema "KP" Yelpaala, Founder and CEO, access.mobile
Panel 2: Today’s Innovations - Where to Invest in Global Health in 2014
- Raj Kumar, President and Editor-in-Chief, Devex (moderator)
- Amie Batson, Chief Strategy Officer, PATH
- Jim Cunningham, Senior Principal Scientist, Merck Research Labs
- Mark Grabowsky, Chief Operating Officer, UNSEO
- Anastasia Thatcher, Global Health Lead, Accenture Development Partnerships
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Wednesday, March 19, 2014
3:00 p.m. - 5:00 p.m.
Reception to Follow
Upcoming Events
In a recent paper, Kate Ambler and coauthors studied the impact of one-season cash transfers for agricultural investment in Senegal and Malawi, using data from a randomized control trial (RCT) in each country. They found evidence that transfers reduced both the number of decision makers and female decision making in Senegal in the short-run, particularly for measures directly related to agriculture. However, the effects disappeared two years after the transfers. Conversely, the authors find transfers in the Malawi program led to robust transitory increases in these measures, seeing a greater impact related to the number of decision makers in the household persisting after two year period. Join us for the latest CGD Invited Research Forum to discuss these opposing findings on the effects of cash transfers on household decision making.
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Estimating intergenerational mobility in developing countries is difficult because matched parent-child income records are rarely available and education is measured very coarsely. In particular, there are no established methods for comparing educational mobility for subsamples of the population when the education distribution is changing over time.
In their recent paper, Sam Asher and coauthors present new methods and new administrative data to overcome this gap, and study intergenerational mobility across groups and across space in India. They find that the intergenerational mobility for the population as a whole has remained constant since liberalization, but cross-group changes have been substantial. Rising mobility among historically marginalized "Scheduled Castes" is almost exactly offset by declining intergenerational mobility among Muslims, a comparably sized group that has few constitutional protections. These findings contest the conventional wisdom that marginalized groups in India have been catching up on average. The paper also explores heterogeneity across space, generating the first high-resolution geographic measures of intergenerational mobility across India, with results across 5600 rural subdistricts and 2300 cities and towns.
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