March 2018

The Time to Make Progress? Right Now.

While women demand equity in health care throughout their lives, there is no other milestone as poignantly deserving as the moment when a woman becomes a mother. In honor of International Women's Day, Saving Lives at Birth reflected on how innovators like Massachusetts General Hospital, Open Development and Bempu can help us achieve gender parity in health outcomes for mothers and their babies. Check out the Medium piece here.

Grand Challenge Female Innovator Series

In honor of women's history month, CII published a five-part blog series on female innovators from the Fighting Ebola and Combating Zika and Future Threats Grand Challenge portfolios. The featured innovators include Beth Kolko from Shift Labs, Molly Scheel from Indiana University, Katherine Jin from Kinnos, Rusty Low from the Institute for Global Environmental Strategies (IGES), and Sharmila Anandasabapathy from Baylor College of Medicine. To read the profiles and learn more about women innovators who are trying to tackle some of the most pressing health challenges, visit the Agency's Medium page.

Disease and Vector Surveillance Workshop

This month, CII hosted a two-day Surveillance Workshop in San Francisco, with support from the Boston Consulting Group. On the first day, nine Combating Zika and Future Threats Grand Challenge disease and vector surveillance innovators discussed shared challenges, refined opportunities to collaborate and worked to define the characteristics of a “game changing” surveillance platform of tomorrow. On the second day, innovators were joined by private sector companies and foundations, including the Skoll Global Threats Fund, Vulcan, Microsoft, Orange and Verily. Each organization shared their ongoing efforts in surveillance, and together, they ideated on the future state of surveillance and models for collaboration.

With the 2030 SDGs Looming, the Public and Private Sectors Team Up for Global Health

The development finance landscape is shifting, where private sector resources are on the rise. There is a $2.5 trillion funding gap to reach our Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2030, and now is the time for the public and private sector to team up and unlock private capital to achieve these SDGs. Read how the Agency and other donors are doing just that.