February 2011

February 01, 2011
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Health Financing: The Foundation of a Strong Health System

Health Systems Strengthening

Millions of people around the world die each year from preventable diseases because they cannot access affordable health care. Developing countries often struggle with insufficient resources and they face numerous challenges trying to strengthen weak health systems. A strong health system working well at all levels, from the household to the community to health facilities to national authorities, can provide effective services to improve the health of the people they serve.

Health financing is the critical foundation for strengthening health systems and ultimately for achieving health impact. Health financing is the starting point – money is the fuel to start and keep a strong health system running. Health financing includes generating funds, distributing those funds, ensuring effective and efficiency use of funds, and protecting the poor from the financial hardship of accessing health services. Without financial resources and proper management of these resources, health workers, health facilities, and medicines would not exist. In difficult economic times, generating those resources seems an insurmountable task. Yet some countries are showing how it can be done.

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February 09, 2011
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Spotlight on Global Health Initiative Plus Countries: Mali

Health Systems Strengthening
Issakha Diallo, MD, MPH, DrPH

Part six of the blog series: Spotlight on Global Health Initiative Plus Countries Amid grave health statistics, the Global Health Initiative (GHI) brings hope of a healthier future in Mali.

Mali is one of the ten poorest countries in the world, ranking 173 out of 175 countries on the 2007 Human Development index of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). Mali has highest percentage of people living on less than a dollar a day.  And, Mali has some of the worst demographic indicators in the sub-Saharan region: a population growth rate of 2.6%, a 6.6 fertility rate (the highest in the sub-Saharan Africa after Niger, at 6.8), and a birth rate of 49.8 per 1,000. The population is very young, with more than 50% of Malians under 15 years old and 17% under 5 years old.

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February 10, 2011
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Training Community Health Workers to Improve Infant and Child Health in Rural Benin

Health Systems Strengthening
Mobilizing communities in rural Benin to improve health.

The West African nation of Benin faces many challenges in achieving Millennium Development Goal 4---reducing child mortality. In the rural communities in Benin (91% of the population live in rural areas), access to health care and treatment is inadequate in relation to the vast need. Very few people have the appropriate skills and capacity to deliver care in these areas. The US Agency for International Development's (USAID) BASICS Benin project is increasing the capability of villages as far as 50 km away from health centers by training Community Health Workers (CHWs) to perform community case management of children five years-old and under.

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February 15, 2011
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Harnessing the Power of Information to Benefit Orphans and Vulnerable Youth

HIV & AIDS

This article was orignially posted on FHI's Interagency Youth Working Group (IYWG) blog.

Several months ago, I was asked to help manage a newly redesigned site that focuses on children and HIV & AIDS. I knew that over the last decade there had been an enormous increase in both the amount of and access to global health information. Thus, the challenge was to shift from simply producing more material to organizing, exchanging, and effectively using this growing knowledge base.

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February 16, 2011
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On Collective Leadership and Collective Intelligence: Words from Tahrir Square, Egypt

Fragile States

Introduction

by Joan Bragar Mansour, ED.D, leadership development specialist at MSH.

Dr. Morsi Mansour is an Egyptian surgeon and Leadership Development Specialist for MSH who teaches leadership to health professionals and develops leadership facilitators around the world. He was in Tahrir Square for two weeks during the uprising in Egypt and shares his experience below.

In Egypt, there has been a Leadership Development Program since 2002. Using their own local resources, health workers unified in over 184 health units across the Aswan governorate in Egypt focused on reducing maternal mortality and succeeded in reducing it from 85/100,000 to 35/100,000 in two years.

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