Month: February 2019

At the end of January, assistant director of programs Andrea Taylor spoke at the SDG Mashup hosted at Impact Hub Geneva in Switzerland. The purpose of the SDG Mashup on the UN's Sustainable Development Goal 3 Good Health and Well-being was to not only showcase leading innovations in healthcare that have impact on SDG 3, but to foster connections and collaborations between sectors to accelerate the achievement of SDG 3. This is a summary of her talk. If all it took to solve the sustainable development goal 3 (SDG3) were good ideas, we could all go home and celebrate; job well done. But as all innovators know, good ideas are not enough. The challenge ahead of us is to get these good ideas to market, to iterate and scale them, and then to…

 This blog post was originally posted on Feb. 1, 2019 at Brookings.edu. Health leaders and policymakers globally have a shared interest and commitment to achieve universal health coverage (UHC) by 2030. Health systems are responding to increased demand due to population growth, aging populations with complex conditions, or prior commitments to achieve UHC. Despite health gains in the last 20 years, problems are particularly acute in sub-Saharan Africa. As economies grow to middle-income levels, they have to tackle communicable diseases while more people are living with non-communicable diseases like diabetes and hypertension. The burden of disease may be higher in low-income economies, but the complexity of this problem could well be the greatest in middle-income countries. Often, the results are escalating unmet need and in-country variation across geographies, gender, or socio-economic groups. While increased spending is generally needed, funding alone…