An impressive coalition of 25 US based global health organizations has promulgated their policy recommendations for Obama last week.

Learn more and read the full report at http://www.theglobalhealthinitiative.org/policyforum.html

Here is their executive summary:
The United States, through a Global Health Initiative, should:
• Double U.S. aid for global health to approximately $16 billion per year in 2011 and challenge other donors to similarly scale up their investments;
• Establish bold U.S. targets for improved health outcomes in each of the six GHI areas and contribute our fair share to reach the healthrelated Millenium Development Goals; and
• Ensure that as we invest in programs to scale up health for all, we build on successful programs and fulfill existing commitments.

The Global Health Initiative
President Obama’s Global Health Initiative (GHI) represents an historic opportunity to achieve bold and ambitious targets in the fight against the most daunting global health challenges of our generation. Alongside related efforts to reform U.S. foreign assistance and to coordinate various initiatives that populate the global health landscape, the GHI is an important signal of the intention of the U.S. government to expand its leadership on global health. At a moment of global economic downturn, we recall the Institute of Medicine’s statement from earlier this year that global health programs “play a crucial role in the broader mission of U.S. foreign policy to reduce poverty, build stronger economies, promote peace, and enhance the U.S. image in the world today.”

Currently the GHI consists only of a limited number of known elements; fundamental aspects such as scope, targets, timelines, and specific costing data have yet to be finalized. The language of a broad and realistic vision of what the U.S. can accomplish, however, is encouraging. This report strongly supports the President’s focus on the six areas identified: HIV; tuberculosis; malaria; reproductive, maternal, newborn and child health; health systems and health workforce; and neglected tropical diseases.

TOWARD A BOLD & EFFECTIVE GLOBAL HEALTH INITIATIVE

“We cannot fix every problem. But we have a responsibility to protect the health of our people, while saving lives, reducing suffering, and supporting the health and dignity of people everywhere. America can make a significant difference in meeting these challenges, and that is why my Administration is committed to act.” –-President Barack Obama, May 5, 2009

To substantively tackle these areas, success will depend upon key decisions:
• First, funding targets must be sufficient to meet current estimates of the U.S. share of funding required to reach internationally agreed upon goals in the six priority areas of the GHI. The nation’s highest scientific body— the National Academies of Sciences, Institute of Medicine—eloquently articulated the U.S. interest in investing significantly more in global health. Initial figures for GHI—$63 billion over six years – will not be sufficient.

• Second, investing in each of these key areas could yield major synergies for people’s health—with an exponential benefit in lives saved. Yet an expanded response to certain health priorities at the expense of planned scale up in other areas would miss this opportunity. To help achieve these key elements of what the GHI can be, a coalition of civil society organizations with expertise in the six GHI priority areas has developed an analysis of the appropriate U.S. program and funding targets that should define the GHI. Our analysis also includes recommendations for policy changes necessary to facilitate the success of the GHI.

Ingredients for A Bold & Effective Initiative
The U.S. government can and should be a leader in global health on a larger scale—moving the world toward realization of the human right to health through smart, aggressive scale up of key health services that improve not only the health of people but also the economies of nations.

This requires continued expansion of what is working and scale up of other priority efforts to levels sufficient to reap the synergies possible—ensuring systems of health that can care for people long term. We cannot address maternal and child health in Southern Africa, for example, without aggressively scaling up AIDS treatment to address the largest cause of deaths of mothers and, often, their nurses and midwives as well. Simultaneously, with smart, integrated and additional programming we can ensure that their communities are stronger because these same women do not die in child birth, their children do not die of pneumonia, and everyone receives core preventative care. As the GHI announcement highlights, a cross-cutting commitment to strengthening country health systems is essential for this to happen—and this will require increased investment in the health workforce to address bottlenecks that have impeded effective health programs for decades. In order to reflect a bold, innovative new approach to global health a GHI is needed which:
1• Supports bold, people-centered, outcome-oriented services reaching toward universal access to health. A focus on a selective set of the cheapest interventions has been the hallmark of weak and ineffective responses that have undermined progress in reaching global health commitments. The GHI should not support rationing of services based on a narrow and restrictive concept of cost effectiveness.
2• Supports direct health service delivery as the core of U.S. global health programs. Major scale up in the purchase of commodities and provision of services to people should be central where it is not currently.
3• Continues promised growth of HIV/AIDS, TB, and malaria programs and uses these as a platform for expanded services. As the greatest killers of people living in impoverished nations, infectious diseases must continue to be a major priority. U.S.-supported HIV programs have been used to expand community health care coverage; these innovative models for delivering integrated community care should be expanded as best practices. This will require full funding of the Lantos-Hyde Act.
4• Sets bold U.S. targets based on global need to urgently scale-up sexual, reproductive, maternal, and child health and neglected disease response. Despite decades of promises to address these priorities, far too little progress has been made, and scandalous rates of preventable sickness, death and disability must spur the U.S. to bold action.
5• Strengthens health systems by focusing on recruiting, training, and retaining health workers. None of the U.S. priorities described here will be reached without sufficient midwives, doctors, nurses, and community health workers.

Prizes, innovation, creativity, south to north information  exchange, and web 2.0 where almost anyone can participate, perhaps a budding social entrepreneur, cool story. Is this an example of Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody?

NEW DELHI: Think out of the box. It pays. This is what 15-year-old Sarojini Mahajan is happy to realise after her idea of using human pulse to charge a cellphone was picked up by Stanford University on Wednesday. Sarojini had sent her idea as an entry to IGNITE 2009 — a nationwide contest of innovative ideas. Though she won a consolation prize in the contest , Stanford University will now work on her idea.

Anil Gupta, vice-chairperson , National Innovation Foundation (NIF), which conducts IGNITE every year, Stanford University has already given a token amount of $1,000 to develop a prototype if feasible. ‘‘ The girl has provided the idea. But we need technical assistance to make it work. Stanford University has come forward to try out if human pulse can be used to charge an e-book they have developed.’’

‘‘ I can’t believe it’s true. I had thought of this idea last year but never told anyone till Neena ma’m once asked for crazy ideas in the class. It was just an idea which has become so big now.’’ Sarojini recalled that she was just sitting once when she thought of watches that run on the human pulse. ‘‘ I wondered if mobiles could be charged using the pulse too.’’

Sarojini teamed up with her teacher to develop her idea further who had by then decided to send her entry to IGNITE this year. They both worked for nearly four months and conceived a charging system in which sensors would be placed on the cellphone. Holding it in hand in a particular way would charge it using the heat of the palm. Sarojini’s recognition has got other students thinking too.

‘‘ Students have a lot of ideas some of which are absolutely crazy. Many of them will be motivated to share them now. I have already started getting new ideas from students,’’ said Punj. Agreed principal Anjali Agarwal. ‘‘ The fact that a 15-year-old student’s idea is being taken up by Stanford University will definitely inspire other students.

Full article here.

For others living in the DC area, this lecture looks well worth going to.
Thursday, Oct 22nd 630-8p.
Koshland Science Museum / costs $7:

From the Announcement:

The H1N1 virus is circling the globe as the newest pandemic. Before H1N1, people were concerned about SARS and avian influenza. Have you ever wondered how close these diseases are to your neighborhood right now or how health officials are tracking these diseases in remote areas of the globe? Join Amy Sonricker from HealthMap and Pamela Johnson, Co-Founder and Chief Health Officer at Voxiva, for a hands-on exploration of how computers, the internet, and phones are providing the new hi-tech and low cost tools of the future to track and prevent infectious disease outbreaks. Before you begin containing a global outbreak, you need to know where the outbreak is or could be occurring. Come meet a scientist and an entrepreneur who are using 21st century tools to predict and track emerging diseases around the world. Hear about the challenges they face and the impacts they have made or hope to make.

I saw this story via twitter and it caught my attention.

Used Hotel Soaps Help Prevent Disease In Developing Countries
*  The Associated Press/Washington Post profiled the efforts of Derreck Kayongo, a Ugandan “anti-poverty advocate.” Kayongo has launched “the Global Soap Project, an effort to help his country’s poorest – one used bar of hotel soap at a time…in his African homeland, the cost of soap is out of reach for many, often with tragic consequences…To get the soaps ready for use, Kayongo separates them according to hotel brand, washes away surface dirt, and then melts the soap in a high-temperature oven….”
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I have to give props and credit for trying to make the world a better place. On the surface at first glance, however, giving used, recycled soap, that granted has been “cleaned”, to fellow human beings seems substandard and to some extent de-humanizing. Would you want someone elses used soap? We want smart, green innovation and stuff that can be recycled or is biodegradable is great. But is “used soap” the kind of innovation we want? I suppose this is similar to used shoes and clothes being donated. The difference there is that it can be expensive and resource intensive to make that stuff, what I am wondering is how much could it possibly cost to make soap? maybe a lot.

Are donations of used soap a bad idea or does it just sound like a bad idea and in reality we should all be using “used soap”? Can’t we do better than this? I dunno, you tell me.

Just happened upon a great discussion about making data make sense quickly on the Innovation in Evaluation Blog over at good.is

What happens when we put people at the center of evaluation (as Jocelyn Wyatt puts it)? In this context, it means recognizing that people are preoccupied with more important tasks than spending long amounts of time in front of dashboards and data visualizations.

This is true in any setting, and in our case it was driving. The role of visualization should not be to demand full attention, but to support the priority task and improve it through feedback loops. The challenge is not just to display how you are doing right now, but also to figure out how you could do better. So, what does this mean for the visualization itself?

Every form of visualization should tell a story. Unfortunately there is limited attention and time to process all the stories. So the gist of the story, or its immediate impact, should be visible right away. The term I like to use for this principle is “glanceability.” What does a visualization tell us before we take time to analyze it? I invite you to look at the following chart and image for 10 seconds each and compare. What did you see? What did you feel?

Modified from Azar Askin’s reproduction of a poster by Muenster Planning Office, Germany

A followup post talks about understanding how data is presented. How can you tell what is fact and what is fiction? What basic questions should you ask of the graph? How do you know if you are being taken for a ride?

Super-cool. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go curl up with some of the other posts here – How Can We Measure What’s Most Meaningful? and In Non-Profit World, Numbers Don’t Tell the Full Story.. (something a friend of mine always used to tell me).

Read all about it! @ Innovation in Evaluation.

Innovation and  social impact for mental health – check out the latest Changemakers competition. There are entries from across the world, the competition closes in 6 days – please spread the word:

“Ashoka’s Changemakers, in partnership with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, is launching the “Rethinking Mental Health: Improving Community Wellbeing” competition in order to explore innovations that allow individuals, families, communities, and society to move past narrow perceptions of mental health and expand our understanding and collective involvement in finding solutions. The winners of this Changemakers collaborative competition will be those entries that best meet the following criteria”:

• Innovation: This is the knock-out test. The entrant must describe a systematic and/or disruptive innovation in the field of mental health. The innovation should be a unique model of change, demonstrating a substantial difference from other initiatives in the field and ready for large-scale expansion.
• Social Impact: It is important that the innovation provides a system-changing solution toward improving individual and community wellbeing. The entry must demonstrate impact on the target population it addresses, either a specific underserved community or the society at large. Some innovations will have proven success at a small level, while others will have grown to engage millions of people. Regardless of the level of demonstrated impact, it is important that the innovation has a potential for application globally. This will be judged by considering the innovation’s potential for scale and replication, in addition to the entrant’s ability to formulate a clear “road map” to reaching larger goals.
• Sustainability: For an innovation to be truly effective it must have a long-term plan for securing financial backing and community support. Entries should describe not only how they are currently financing their work, but also how they plan to finance their work in the future. The most successful entrants go beyond discussing whether or not they will charge for services and describe a business plan. They should also demonstrate that they have strong partnerships and support networks to address an ongoing need, and to aid in scalability and the maintenance of a clear financial strategy.

The DARPA of global health, deadline is Nov. 2nd for an initial round of funding for $100,000:

One great idea is all it takes to improve the health of millions around the world. What is yours?
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is now accepting grant proposals for the Grand Challenges Explorations, a $100 million initiative to encourage bold and unconventional global health solutions.

Anyone can apply, regardless of your prior experience or institutional affiliation. Previous winners include graduate students, entrepreneurs at start-up companies, and creative thinkers from all fields of research. Proposals are currently being accepted online until November 2, 2009 on the following topics:

*Create New Ways to Protect Against Infectious Disease
*Create Low-Cost Diagnostics for Priority Global Health Conditions
*Create New Ways to Induce and Measure Mucosal Immunity
*Create New Technologies for Contraception

Initial grants will be $100,000 each, and projects showing promise will have the opportunity to receive additional funding of up to $1 million. Full descriptions of topics and application instructions are available at: http://www.grandchallenges.org/explorations.

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