Archive for the ‘Global Development’ category

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Carter Center Health Programs and Partners Celebrate Record Progress, 35.8 Million Treatments in Fight Against Neglected Tropical Diseases in 2010

March 30th, 2011

By The Carter Center

The Carter Center’s health programs enabled a record 35.8 million treatments in 2010 to protect against neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) in thousands of communities in some of the most remote and forgotten places in Africa and the Americas.

Since 1986, The Carter Center has been a leader in the control, elimination, and eradication of neglected diseases, working at the grassroots in partnership with ministries of health and low-resource communities to conduct health education and mass drug administration, and to develop health service infrastructure.  The Carter Center’s 10 health programs are data-driven and seek to help fill gaps in health care, looking for opportunities to eliminate or eradicate diseases wherever possible, and to control diseases that cannot be completely eliminated.  Center disease interventions currently address Guinea worm, river blindness, trachoma, lymphatic filariasis, schistosomiasis, and malaria.

The Carter Center conducts rigorous annual peer reviews and evaluations in conjunction with ministries of health from 14 countries and other partner organizations.

“We don’t just rely on increased treatment numbers to tell us our efforts are working to improve health. The Carter Center uses evidence-based practices to carefully evaluate whether our interventions are significantly reducing the burden of disease,” said Dr. Donald Hopkins, vice president of the Carter Center’s Health Programs.

The 2010 statistics confirm dramatic improvements in public health achieved as a direct result of the Center’s disease efforts in partner countries.

2010 Achievements

» Read more: Carter Center Health Programs and Partners Celebrate Record Progress, 35.8 Million Treatments in Fight Against Neglected Tropical Diseases in 2010

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Posted in Global Development, Global Health, NTDs, Tropical Medicine, Vaccine Diplomacy

Pilot Case Study: Do Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) Improve access to pharmaceuticals in Uganda?

March 25th, 2011

Check out this interesting recent pilot study from the Initiative for Public-Private Partnerships for Health, a research initiative out of the Global Forum for Health Research, whose goal is to improve public-private collaborations for health.

The UK Department for International Development (DFID) funded the Initiative on Public-Private Partnerships for Health (IPPPH)1 to conduct a pilot study in Uganda to assess the health and health systems impact of public-private partnerships (PPPs) for improving access to pharmaceuticals in relation to leprosy, lymphatic filariasis, onchocerciasis, sleeping sickness, and HIV/AIDS. The specific remit was to examine issues of ownership, integration, coordination, implementation and impact, with a particular focus on the unique strengths and problems of these access PPPs as distinct from other comparable programs where drugs are competitively procured. Fieldwork visits were made to five districts in Uganda –Hoima, Kampala, Katakwi, Masaka and Soroti – selected on the basis of active implementation of the PPP programs [...]

Read the full pilot study here.

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Posted in Africa, collaboration, Global Development, Global Health, healthcare, NTDs, pharmaceuticals

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Conditional Cash Transfers – Learning as We Go

March 21st, 2011

By: Richard Skolnik

The use of conditional cash transfers (CCTs) is spreading. Originating in Mexico and Brazil, CCTs are incentive payments that governments make to people to encourage them to engage in selected programs, often in health or education. The payments are “conditional” on people’s participating in those program in an agreed way. CCTs are now used in a number of countries to promote better nutrition, improved health in young children, and safer pregnancy outcomes for mothers and children, among other goals. The evidence suggests that CCTs might be a cost-effective approach to improving a number of health outcomes, especially in settings where there are important social and economic constraints to people’s accessing key health services.

As the use of CCTs expands, I look forward to seeing more research on: the ethics of paying people for making certain choices; how to sustain the behavioral impacts of CCTs; how to pay for them; and how to retain community-based approaches to behavior change when appropriate.

It will be valuable to see more explicit attention paid to ethical issues related to cash incentives for poor people to engage in certain behaviors.  To date, there does not appear to have been a systematic examination of them, either broadly or as they have played out in the CCT programs thus far. Ethicists are working with economists to address these questions and a seminar at Harvard in April on CCTs and ethics is a welcome step. » Read more: Conditional Cash Transfers – Learning as We Go

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Posted in Global Development, Global Health, Latin America and the Caribbean, money, social welfare

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The Solutions that Aren’t (Part 1)

March 16th, 2011

By: Alanna Shaikh

In the past couple of years we’ve faced major reconsideration of two of international development’s biggest miracles: micro-credit and the Green Revolution.[i] They have gone from being seen as world-changing silver bullets to just one more tool in a kind of effective arsenal.

Micro-credit – the extension of small loans to poor people – it seems, doesn’t lift most people out of poverty. Instead, what it does is help poor people to smooth their consumption – spread the cost of major expenditures over time. A loan that pays for a wedding, a home, or medical expenses allows a family to pay in installments slowly, as opposed to being suddenly drained of all their resources. It acts, in fact, in much the same way as micro-savings. Or a credit card, for that matter, and how many people have been lifted out of poverty by a Discover card? It’s a useful tool for money management, and a valuable tool for people who previously had no access to this kind of credit, but it’s not a game-changer. (For more information on micro-finance, I recommend reading anything David Roodman has written in particular this paper and his excellent blog.)

The Green Revolution has faced a similar rethinking. For those of you not familiar with the term, the Green Revolution was “a series of research, development, and technology transfer initiatives, occurring between the 1940s and the late 1970s, that increased agriculture production around the world, beginning most markedly in the late 1960s…The initiatives involved the development of high-yielding varieties of cereal grains, expansion of irrigation infrastructure, modernization of management techniques, distribution of hybridized seeds, synthetic fertilizers, and pesticides to farmers.”

The impact of the Green Revolution was felt primarily in South Asia, with Africa as a lesser beneficiary of the new technology. It has long been seen as one of international development aid’s greatest successes. We broke South Asia’s famine cycle. How do you not count that as a win?

» Read more: The Solutions that Aren’t (Part 1)

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Posted in Global Development, Global Health, money, policy, trends

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