Last January, Marisa Steinmetz and Allison Casey, two students from the Harvard Graduate School of Education landed in the Republic of Madagascar with a mission from the Ministry of Education: to understand teacher absenteeism and identify possible solutions to this problem.
Month: March 2018
The ‘D-Team’: Cape Verde’s Use of Leadership to Drive Health Reform
Following the participation of both the Health and Finance Ministers in the Harvard Ministerial Forums, Cape Verde Ministers mandated a team of top health and finance officials dubbed the ‘D-team’ to work with the Ministerial Program to strengthen health service delivery and increase budget effectiveness.
Celebrated Reproductive Health Expert Joins Advisory Board
Dr. Senait Fisseha, MD, JD, Director of International Programs for the Susan Thompson Buffet Foundation and Clinical Professor of Obstetrics & Gynecology at the University of Michigan Medical School, has been appointed to the Advisory Board of the Harvard Ministerial Leadership Program. As the founding executive director of the University of Michigan’s Center for International Reproductive Health Training, Dr. Fisseha has spent her career leading groundbreaking research and training programs to improve reproductive health care in Ethiopia.
Harvard’s Follow-Up Support in Uganda Leads Increases Fiscal Space for Health
Following participation in the Harvard Ministerial Leadership Forums by Uganda’s Ministers of Finance and Health, a Follow-up team of senior health and finance ministry officials began work with the Ministerial Program and its partners. A key focus of this work was the need to reallocate existing budget to priority health areas such as primary health care and capture fiscal space to increase available health funding. By June 2016, the inter-ministerial team had created fiscal space in the health budget to the value of over $22 million for a range of actions designed to strengthen health worker productivity, procurement and supply chain management with the goal of improving the standard of care in frontline health facilities.
Announcing the Harvard Ministerial Doctoral Fellowship
Denizhan Duran has been selected as the first Harvard Ministerial Doctoral Fellow. A graduate of Middlebury College, Denizhan is currently enrolled as a Doctor of Public Health student at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Through previous positions at the World Bank, World Health Organization, Clinton Health Access Initiative, and the Center for Global Development, Denizhan has experience working in Côte D’Ivoire, Ghana, Ethiopia and Malawi. For the purpose of this Fellowship, Denizhan will work with the Harvard Ministerial Leadership Program and the Côte D’Ivoire Ministries of Health and Finance to conduct research to develop policy recommendations on how Côte D’Ivoire can increase fiscal space for health through budget reprioritization and taxation analyses.
Ramping Up Technical Assistance: Ministerial Program Launches Innovative Virtual Platform
Since inception in 2012, the Harvard Ministerial Leadership Program has included a (post-Harvard) in-country Follow-up component designed to support participating Ministers in achieving their primary (legacy) goals by providing planning and implementation management capacity to senior officials. Over the past seven years, 21 countries and 272 officials have participated in the Follow-up component. Although a significant number of countries benefitted, the Follow-up was highly selective only inviting four or five countries annually. Furthermore, after seven years, it is evident that the Ministerial Program does not have the capacity to sustain this effort at the intensity needed to make a lasting impact.