JULY 2018

Last Week: Saving Lives at Birth DevelopmentXChange

Last week, USAID, Norad, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Grand Challenges Canada, DFID and KOICA hosted the 8th DevelopmentXChange for the Saving Lives at Birth Grand Challenge. This event convened current innovators as well as promising candidates for Round 8 awards, and included over 200 curated mentor and partner meetings. The event also featured an Innovation Marketplace, Pitch Competition and a special performance of scenes from BUMP, this year’s mainstage production of the EST/Sloan Project inspired by Jorge Odón, the Argentinian car mechanic behind the SL@B-supported Odón Device.

How One Simple Solution has Saved Thousands of Babies

Every year, an estimated 2.6 million babies die within their first month of life. About 15 percent of these deaths are caused by complications from severe infection, which in most cases can be avoided with simple, cost-effective interventions. Since 2002, USAID and its partners have been working to scale up the use of one life-saving intervention in particular: the antiseptic chlorhexidine. This USAID blog tells the story of the successful scale-up of chlorhexidine in Nepal, and what we can learn from it.

Access to Medical Devices in Low-income Countries: Addressing Sustainability Challenges in Medical Device Donations

This #NAMPerspectives discussion paper is about how local infrastructure problems in low-income countries can lead to medical donations becoming a detriment instead of helping to improve care. Many hospitals don’t have the funding or training to properly use and maintain these machines, so they often break and are not repaired, or are simply abandoned. This paper addresses some of the problems hindering the use of donated medical devices, and identifies potential solutions to ensure these devices can be accessed by those who need them most. Read more.

Podcast Recording of Panel on Empathy in Global Health

Last month we co-hosted a panel with Matchboxology and sponsored by Medtronic Foundation on empathy and its role in global health. Panelists offered global and in-country perspectives on the effects of empathy when applied in global health and how we might best apply and measure it. If you missed it, you can listen to the podcast recording.

Community Health Financing Compendium

In an effort to make the fragmented health financing landscape more accessible to governments and partners, the Financing Alliance for Health (FAH) has developed a Community Health Financing Compendium. The compendium provides a comprehensive overview of financing instruments, mechanisms and approaches available to governments. The compendium, initially launched alongside the USAID/FAH Community Health Financing Gap Report in February 2018, aims to help governments, implementing partners and other stakeholders navigate the various sources of financing available to support the scale up of community health programming, including grant, debt, blended, domestic and private.