Wind to HBCU's Sails: Bill Gates wrote this in 2020 "We’re finally learning why countries excel at saving lives" (256 hits)
Save lives Ever since I was a teenager, I’ve tackled every big new problem the same way: by starting off with two questions. I used this technique at Microsoft, and I still use it today. I ask these questions literally every week about COVID-19.
Here they are: Who has dealt with this problem well? And what can we learn from them?
They seem like obvious questions, but sometimes it's surprisingly hard to find the answers—especially when it comes to global health. There are low- and middle-income countries that have made huge leaps in, for example, delivering vaccines or ending malnutrition. But anyone who wants to identify those countries, find out how they did it, and apply the lessons in their own country would have their work cut out for them.
In sports, every coach is able to study the most successful teams and figure out what they’re doing well. There’s no reason that things should be any different when the goal is preventing childhood deaths instead of scoring touchdowns.
That’s why I was eager to be part of a global effort to fill the gap. Over the past three years, health experts and organizations from countries at every income level (including the Gates Foundation) have come together to find out who has made the most progress on certain health problems, identify what made them so successful, and help others put these lessons into action.
The result of all this effort—the Exemplars in Global Health program—launched earlier this year. If you want to know which countries have made the most progress with limited resources, Exemplars is a great place to start.
For now, Exemplars focuses on five areas: under-five mortality; vaccine delivery; the role of community health workers; epidemic preparedness and response; and childhood stunting (the reduction in physical and mental development caused by poor nutrition). The team will be adding other areas, including newborn and maternal mortality, family planning, maternal anemia, and primary health care systems.
The Exemplars team has scoured the world for the best performers and worked with experts in those countries to find out what worked so well. For example, they identified seven countries that have excelled at reducing the number of children who die before their fifth birthday: Bangladesh, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Nepal, Peru, Rwanda, and Senegal. The Exemplars website has a profile of each country, detailing insights from its work that other countries could learn from.
