Over three days in late November about 25 currently serving government Ministers from across Africa gathered in Johannesburg, together with a similar number of selected young African achievers, to jointly develop new approaches to current high-levels of youth unemployment across Africa and to explore possibilities for optimizing the prospects of a demographic dividend.

Ministers, including finance, economic planning, education, health and youth had all participated in Ministerial Forums at Harvard over the past three years and continue to benefit from the post-Harvard support that is a key part of the Harvard Ministerial Leadership Program.

The Harvard Ministerial Roundtable for Policy Innovation in Human Capital Development in Johannesburg extended the on-going peer-networking among ministers participating in the Harvard Ministerial Leadership Program to include for the first time a cross-section of young African achievers from diverse backgrounds in discussions about optimizing Africa’s human capital.

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Speaking to participants in the seventh annual Harvard Ministerial Leadership Forum in early June, Margaret Kenyatta, First Lady of Kenya, outlined the impressive results of her groundbreaking Beyond Zero campaign: In Kenya, over the past five years, infant mortality has fallen from 52 per 1,000 to 39 per 1,000 live births; under five mortality came down from 74 per 1,000 to 52 per 1,000. Maternal mortality dropped from 488 per 100,000 to 362 per 1,000.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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