The Pump Handle

A few recent items highlight programs and innovations that are helping improve health in developing countries:

Journalist and Nieman Fellow Christine Gorman spent three months in Malawi to learn about a new program that’s tackling the country’s severe nursing shortage with higher pay and more support for nursing education and training. She’s been writing about her trip and the issues it raised for her on her blog, Global Health Report, and now reports that the American Journal of Nursing has published a photo essay on nurses in Malawi, featuring text from Gorman and photos by Eileen Hohmuth-Lemonick. Gorman convinced AJN to make it available free to non-subscribers, so check it out – the PDF online-only content is even more stunning.
As part of its “Death in Birth” series on high maternal mortality rates in Tanzania, the New York Times published a piece about what happens to children whose mothers died giving birth to them. Several Tanzanian orphanages are taking a promising approach to helping those children: bringing a teenaged female relative to care for the child in the orphanage for two or three years, and then returning both the caregiver and child to their community. The young children can spend their first fragile years in a setting where malnutrition and infection are less of a threat, and their teenaged caregivers get a chance at education – many of them arrive illiterate and leave knowing how to read.
And, finally, the blog Technology, Health & Development has moved to a new site and become Global Health Ideas, which aims to “document solutions and exchange ideas on innovative projects in global health.” Recent post topics include shortening doctors’ coat sleeves to reduce disease spread, new technologies’ impacts on communities, and innovations for stopping postpartum hemorrhaging. Their Case Studies/Publications page also includes a lot of useful links.

If you’ve come across anything recently about a promising approach to tackling global health challenges, feel free to post a link in the comments.

Comments

#1 AB
June 25, 2009

Thanks for the shout out! There is a potentially interesting even coming up, Health Affairs is rolling out their new issue – Delivering on Global Health next month:
http://www.burnesscommunications.com/new/new_rsvp.htm?doc_id=944311
#2 AB
June 25, 2009

Thanks for the shout out! There is a potentially interesting even coming up, Health Affairs is rolling out their new issue – Delivering on Global Health next month:
http://www.burnesscommunications.com/new/new_rsvp.htm?doc_id=944311
Sorry… forgot to say great post – can’t wait to read your next one!
#3 משחקים
June 28, 2009

very good post and good blog
hope that you will write more good posts like this

have a nice day
#4 סרטים
November 9, 2009

thabks for the links
#5 משחקים
November 10, 2009

tanks for this, have a great day
#6 שלטים
May 3, 2010

nice post’ keep going like thet
#7 יישור שיניים
January 11, 2011

very good links !!

thanks !!
#8 משחקים
February 27, 2011

Wow, that is one great piece. Thanks for all the great links.
#9 Amila
vQwnDEqgjEPYcb
December 1, 2012

It seems to me that this is basically an emrcpiial question not a normative one. Money should be spent where it’s going to be most effective and create the most benefit. If PiH is going to get greater results for their marginal dollar in Peru than in Haiti, then that’s where they should be spending their money. Where PiH’s, or any other NGO’s, money is going to be best spent is a case by case question, but it’s fundamentally one that should be driven by data not by development philosophy. Just because an NGO is already operating in a given community doesn’t necessarily imply that any additional funding they get should also be spent in that community or the neighboring one (nor do I think that’s what you’re implying). Not every NGO exists in a state of requiring more and more funding (although I doubt any would actually say that). Human/financial/physical resources are not always what a program needs and those resources can sometimes be better used expanding. Hypothetically, hiring the tenth doctor at VHW is going to have a lot less benefit than hiring the first doctor at the town across the border in Tanzania. Additionally, I think there’s a somewhat false choice underlying this argument. Frequently, the choice an NGO faces isn’t spend donor money on existing programs or spend it on expanding programs. It’s spend donor money on expanding programs or don’t get the money in the first place. The last organization I worked for tended to expand to countries where there was donor money on the table for a specific country. It wasn’t an option to take that money for existing programs. Now, how donors allocate funding and to who is a much bigger question for another day, but that’s not something NGOs always control. I don’t know anything about PiH’s funding structure, but the implication that they had complete control over the matter may not be accurate in this case, and certainly isn’t accurate in others.To the question: “Why pick up and move to Peru when there is still so much to do in Haiti?” Well, sure, there is still so much left to do in Haiti, but that doesn’t mean that PiH is the best NGO to do it. I’m not going to argue that there isn’t a monumental amount of work left to be done in Haiti, but the underlying assumption that PiH should be doing that work is one that, at the very least needs justifying, as it does in every case. Before I start hammering the same idea over and over again, I’ll just return to my initial point. This is an emrcpiial question not an ideological one. Some organizations would be more effective deepening their involvement in the communities they already work in. Some organizations would be more effective expanding their model to new communities. I think the more pressing questions are: how do NGOs decide which approach to take? What kind of data is needed to make these decisions? Finally, as an aside, to characterize the main motivation for an NGO to expand as primarily a function of vanity and selfishness strikes me as unnecessarily cynical and generally inaccurate. Independent of the question of whether to focus on scaling successful programs broadly or deeply, I think the justification given is off base. I don’t think a guy like Paul Farmer decides to take PiH to Peru and Rwanda so that he can visit new places and brag to donors any more than he went to Haiti in the first place for those reasons. Similarly, I tend to be skeptical of the argument that if Health Promotion Associates has hit upon a really successful model that they would scale up so that the founders can brag to donors and travel to new countries. This may tend towards being too idealistic, but I like to think that people get into this line of work because they genuinely care about doing good work. Obviously, good intentions are not enough, but I don’t think we get very far by questioning those intentions in the first place.