Côte D’Ivoire Education Minister, Kandia Camara, is the first winner of the Harvard Ministerial Medal of Achievement.  When Minister Camara was invited to participate in the annual Harvard Ministerial Leadership Forum in June 2018, she had been in office for seven years already, but she faced an uphill struggle.  She because Minister in the wake of a devastatingly destructive 10-year civil war.  Despite significant resources allocated to rebuilding the education system in the years after the civil war, enrollment rates and outcomes remained well below national targets and international standards.

Minister Camara came to Harvard with a 10-year sector plan that included a strategic focus on “accelerating the development of human capital and the promotion of social wellbeing” as well as a target education budget of 6% of GDP.  What the Minister needed was a roadmap for how to achieve this broad goal.  A core element of the Ministerial Forum curriculum is focus on legacy, as the defining strategic objective of Ministers’ tenure in office.  Legacy must focus on a clearly defined national priority, with measurable targets and achievable within set timelines.  At the end of an intensive week at Harvard, Minister Camara had a clear and motivating legacy goal: Achieve a school enrollment rate of 100% by 2025 and improve the quality of education to ensure a literate population with the necessary skills for the development of our country.

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Like virtually all philanthropists, I started out seeking the “best” projects to fund. I described myself as a mezzanine funder—I hunted for programs with evidence of impact and aimed to expand or replicate them. I never considered supporting or, frankly, even interacting with the public sector.

By serendipity, quite early in my philanthropic career, I partnered with a visionary government leader to establish his country’s first public-sector HIV/AIDS treatment program. The initiative saved the lives of thousands more people than it would have been possible to reach through the non-state sector. This collaboration further enabled me to responsibly exit the funding arrangement after only a few years, having laid the groundwork for the government to assume responsibility for service provision. It ultimately segued into an invitation to extend the partnership to another region of the country.

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Human development priorities are generally multidimensional and intersectoral; yet government is traditionally organized in silos and thus ill-equipped to address cross-sectoral challenges. Ministers implement their sector specific policies and programs and compete fiercely for a larger share of the available budget.  Even within ministries, program directorates ring-fence their authority and battle over resources. The traditional lack of interministerial collaboration around common human development objectives undermines the potential impact and efficiency of government efforts and investments.  To facilitate this kind of collaborative approach to human capital development, the Harvard Ministerial Leadership Program increasingly engages clusters of human develop sectors ministers, as well finance and economic planning ministers from the same countries. The benefits of interministerial collaboration in the implementation of government programs is becoming clearer from a growing body of country experience. The Seqota Declaration to address malnutrition in Ethiopia and Criança Feliz Program to improve early childhood development (ECD) in Brazil are two standout examples.

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Baroness Valerie Amos, Director of School of Oriental & African Studies at the University of London, has been appointed to the Advisory Board of the Harvard Ministerial Leadership Program. Valerie Amos served as Secretary of State for International Development in the administration of UK Prime Minister, Tony Blair.  In 1997, she was elevated to the British House of Lords and appointed Leader in 2003.  Between 2009 and 2010, she served as UK High Commissioner to Australia.  In 2010, Baroness Amos was appointed the eighth United Nations Undersecretary General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator. She has also held numerous other public sector roles including Chief Executive of the Equal Opportunities Commission and adviser to the Mandela Government on leadership and change management issues. Baroness Amos is co-founder and Patron of the Amos Bursary, which promotes higher education opportunities for young men of African and Caribbean heritage in the UK.

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In January 2019, 40 students from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (HSPH) and the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) worked in seven countries across Africa in support of health and education ministers in those countries who are part of the Harvard Ministerial Leadership Program. Students were charged with in-country policy-focused research to help inform implementation of the Ministers’ priority policy goals developed during their time at Harvard in June 2018. In March, participating students provided an in-person report-back to Chan School Dean Michelle Williams and HGSE Dean Bridget Long.

Through presentations and posters, students shared the results of their research, which included developing a tool for teachers’ performance evaluation in Côte D’Ivoire, exploring the feasibility of mobilizing more resources from universal health insurance premiums in Kenya, conducting a landscape analysis of existing health centers in Lesotho, and making recommendations for how to increase student enrollment in technical and vocational education and training in Mauritius. In addition to briefing Dean Williams and Long on the substance of their policy research, students attested to the unique experiential value of working directly with high-level government officials and contributing to priority issues these governments are dealing with.

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Current and former finance and economic planning ministers from 20 countries participated in the seventh annual Harvard Ministerial Forum at Harvard last week. A key focus of the Forum was groundbreaking new research from David Bloom, Clarence James Gamble Professor of Economics and Demography at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, correlating economic returns from human development investments. [link to David’s paper] Bloom found that highest returns result from reductions in fertility; increased life span resulting from better health care and more healthy living; and increased educational attainment.

Participating ministers were challenged to consider whether their current budget spending is building a foundation for sustainable economic growth. For example, health and education account for the largest part of most countries’ budgets, but in many developing countries health and education outcomes are poor. One result is substantial and growing numbers of unemployed young people. Another is population increase continuing to outpace GDP growth. Ministers mapped a human development pathway for each of their countries focusing on the key human development building blocks with highest long-term economic benefits such as early childhood nutrition and educational development, better quality primary school education, access to comprehensive reproductive health services, and strengthening primary health care.

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