What Is Country Ownership Anyway? Rethinking Global Health Partnerships
The concept of country ownership has become increasingly visible in donor policy and strategy, yet definitions vary and there is little clarity and great diversity in how this concept is articulated and practiced by donor and recipient countries. Health experts from Ethiopia, Mozambique, Uganda and Zambia will discuss why and how the U.S. government and host country actors--governments and civil society—are redefining their relationship. Our panelists will reflect on PEPFAR and other global AIDS programs in the last decade to suggest how the U.S. Global Health Initiative's key principle of country ownership may be applied to achieve specific donor and host country objectives. Our panel will attempt to answer some key questions: What is the U.S government's definition of country ownership and does this resonate with that of host country governments'? What are the objectives of country ownership? And what are the challenges to getting to a more shared definition and practice of this concept?
On Monday, June 21, 2010 Center for Global Development hosted a discussion on What is Country Ownership Anyway? Rethinking Global Health Partnerships featuring opening remarks by Minister Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Minister of Health, Ethiopia and Chair, Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. The panel included Nandini Oomman, Director, HIV/AIDS Monitor, Center for Global Development; Warren Buckingham, Director, Country Program Support, Office of the Global AIDS Coordinator; Caesar Cheelo, Zambia Principal Investigator, HIV/AIDS Monitor; Lecturer, Economics Department, University of Zambia; Dirce Costa, Mozambique Principal Investigator, HIV/AIDS Monitor; Development Economist, Austral-COWI Consulting; Donald Shriber, Deputy Director for Policy and Communication, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; Freddie Ssengooba, Uganda Principal Investigator, HIV/AIDS Monitor; Lecturer, Makerere University School of Public Health; and Janis Timberlake, Director of Country Programs, Global Health Initiative Launch Team, Global Health Bureau, USAID. Lawrence MacDonald, CGD Vice President of Communications and Policy Outreach, moderated the discussion.
Watch the event online
![]() |
![]() |
|
|
![]() |
|
![]() |
![]() |
Related Topics:
Monday, June 21, 2010
11:00am to 12:30pm
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.

Indian agriculture remains vulnerable to the vagaries of weather, and the looming threat of climate change may expose this vulnerability further. Using district-level data on temperature, rainfall and crop production, Siddharth Hari’s paper first documents a long-term trend of rising temperatures, declining average precipitation and increase in extreme precipitation events. One key finding is that the impact of temperature and rainfall are felt only in the extreme: when temperatures are much higher, rainfall is significantly lower, and the number of “dry days” greater is than normal. He also finds that these impacts are significantly more adverse in unirrigated areas (and hence rainfed crops) compared to irrigated areas. Can policy makers react to the challenges of climate change and find ways to get “more crop for every drop?"

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.
Commentary Menu