Featured

  • November 15, 2016

    What does it take to control an epidemic? Learning from Thailand’s experience

    Written by
    Dr. Timothy Mastro, MD, DTM&H, Chief Science Officer and Director, Global Health, Population and Nutrition, FHI 360

    Earlier this summer, the HIV/AIDS effort achieved a notable accomplishment that the rest of the public health community may have overlooked, missing an important learning opportunity. In June, the World Health Organization certified that Thailand achieved what was inconceivable just 20 years ago: elimination of mother-to-child transmission of HIV. Thailand is the first country with a generalized HIV epidemic to achieve this milestone, one that is crucial to epidemic control.

    Two decades ago, the HIV epidemic was expanding in Thailand. Use of antiretroviral drugs to prevent mother-to-child HIV transmission was an expensive, newly discovered intervention that had barely been implemented in areas of the world where resources were limited and the disease burden was greatest.

    Despite these challenges, only 85 children were born with HIV infection in Thailand in 2015, compared to 1,000 children in 2000. This remarkable achievement resulted from a combination of essential factors:

    • Strong national leadership
    • A solid, functional health care system
    • A commitment to extending health care services to all people in the country, including undocumented individuals

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  • November 10, 2016

    Strengthening civil society’s role in responding to violent extremism

    Written by
    Anne Salinas, Director, Peacebuilding and Conflict Mitigation, FHI 360

    Preventing and countering violent extremism requires nothing short of an integrated, multifaceted, locally driven approach. FHI 360 has been working since 2008 with civil society groups in affected regions to prevent and respond to violent extremism. Recently, we discussed the lessons learned from our work at this year’s Trans-Saharan Counter-Terrorism Partnership conference. The following is what we shared.

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  • October 17, 2016

    Harnessing power to shift the economic balance toward equality for women

    Written by
    Elise Young, Senior Advisor, Gender Mainstreaming and Thought Leadership, FHI 360
    Shaheen, owner of a leading fashion house in Dhaka.

    Shaheen, owner of a leading fashion house in Dhaka. Photo: Asian Development Bank/CC BY-NC-ND

    The push to advance women’s economic empowerment around the world is not a fashionable procurement exercise. It is not a way for governments, private sector investors or implementing partners such as FHI 360 to look good. It is necessary and urgent. It is a lifeline to women, families, communities and countries struggling with health and food security, environmental degradation, economic growth barriers and political turmoil.

    Economic empowerment is a universal human right that protects women and people of all genders and social identities from sexual harassment, exploitation and gender-based violence.

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  • October 5, 2016

    Rachel — like #YesAllGirls — is determined to go to school

    Written by
    Rachel Daniel, 4 Pillars PLUS student, Government Secondary School Federal Housing Estate, Nigeria
    Hannah Orenstein, Digital Manager, Malala Fund
    Rachel

    Photo Credit: Dooshima Orjime, 4 Pillars PLUS project

    In the beginning of September, Malala challenged girls around the world to show their support for refugee girls by sharing a #YesAllGirls photo — just like she did with her classmates.

    Girls (and boys!) from all over posted picture after inspiring picture, with each group seemingly larger than the last. One of our favorite photos came from the students at JSS Government Secondary School Federal Housing Estate in Calabar, Nigeria.

    Rachel, a 13-year-old student enrolled in the Cross River State school, shared her story.

    “After my dad married my mum, they had my sister and I. My father did not care for my mum because he gave her only female children. He kept late nights and had other women. My mum left after she couldn’t take it anymore. She also left us at a tender age with our grandmother. My father married another woman, who had male children for him. My step mum told my dad to send us out of the house which he did. My sister was serious about writing her Senior Secondary Exams; but due to lack of parental guidance and care on the part of both my mum and dad, my sister failed her exams. This has made life more depressing for her. Anytime I see my sister I cry, because her education has ended from the lack of concern on the part of my father, it makes me sad. I pray for my sister and don’t want her life stagnated or her education ending just like that.

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  • September 26, 2016

    Equity in education: Evidence for investments in the SDG era

    Written by
    Patrick Fine, Chief Executive Officer, FHI 360

    Nothing has inspired me more than the sacrifices I have seen African parents make to send their children to school. In Swaziland in the 1990s, I calculated that a typical rural family spent over 60 percent of its disposable income to pay for school fees, books and uniforms. The reason families are willing to devote so much to educate their children was summed up by the pioneering American educator Horace Mann in 1848, when he wrote, “Education, then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great equalizer of the conditions of men, the balance-wheel of the social machinery.”

    As our world has become more interconnected and technology-dependent, the role of education as the primary pathway to social and economic mobility has grown stronger. We now live in the most prosperous era in the history of mankind, but one where a quality education is the price of admission into the 21st century knowledge economy.

    As more countries have prospered, the gap between the haves and the have nots — which, in most low- and lower-middle income countries, is the gap between the well-educated and the undereducated — has become a potentially destabilizing factor. Lack of education decreases life opportunities and increases political marginalization, perpetuating and exacerbating social and economic inequality. In an increasingly uncertain and volatile world, educational inequality not only is a main component of the poverty trap, but is also a tripwire for social strife and conflict.

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  • September 8, 2016

    A Deeper Look: Making development more relevant and effective

    Written by
    Patrick Fine, Chief Executive Officer, FHI 360

    How can we make our work more relevant and effective?

    Earlier this summer, FHI 360 held its first summit on integrated development, Greater Than the Sum of its Parts. Ben Ramalingam, a researcher and the Leader of the Digital & Technology Cluster at the Institute of Development Studies, delivered our keynote address. While Ben was in town, we talked about how to maximize the effectiveness of international development and how we need a paradigm shift to generate real change.

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  • June 14, 2016

    A conversation on coming to terms with the high cost of human development

    Written by
    Patrick Fine, Chief Executive Officer, FHI 360

    How do we measure nonprofit organizational effectiveness?

    I was delighted to have a conversation with Jeri Eckhart Queenan, Partner & Global Development Practice Head at the Bridgespan Group, about the challenges in financing development. This was a great opportunity to discuss emerging trends in how organizations manage their programs in order to deliver the most effective results while maximizing value for their stakeholders, especially the beneficiaries of their work.

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  • May 25, 2016

    Integrated development approaches are challenging but resonate with clients

    Written by
    Tessa Ahner-McHaffie, Technical Officer, Integrated Development, FHI 360

    Tamimah grew up in Nakuru, a community in Kenya’s Rift Valley where the rate of HIV infection is high and where many young people don’t graduate high school. Tamimah’s early home life was precarious: Her mother left her and her three younger siblings, and her father provided limited support. The children were raised primarily by their grandmother.

    Before Tamimah turned 13, her grandmother died, leaving the children without primary support. Tamimah and her two sisters and brother struggled to take care of themselves, stay in school and be healthy. It was “very hard to grow up in this place,” Tamimah said.

    Things began to shift, however, when they were recruited to take part in APHIAplus, an FHI 360 project focused on improving health care delivery and multisector services to vulnerable populations in the Rift Valley. Through APHIAplus, which is funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development, Tamimah gained access to health education and services. She also received support to cover the costs of her school fees and supplies.

    From these multipronged activities, there was a ripple effect: She was able to stay in school. Upon graduation, Tamimah studied tailoring through a vocational program also offered through APHIAplus and was able to provide for her siblings. After a year, she saved enough to open Al Hamis Café, named after her brother.

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  • May 17, 2016

    Women and girls deserve better

    Written by
    Patrick Fine, Chief Executive Officer, FHI 360

    How can an adolescent girl succeed in school if she is not protected from sexual violence inside the classroom? How does a child thrive when his mother must choose between buying medication or nutritious food? We know that poverty, lack of access to education, poor health and violence are intimately linked, and how we tackle these problems is a global issue with important implications for the way the United States funds international development programs for women and girls. At the moment, we tend to compartmentalize our efforts in top-down, single-issue solutions, not because that is the most effective way to meet the needs of women and girls, but because it meets the needs of funders and their implementing partners. As we enter the new era of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), we need to do better.

    There is an obvious starting point.

    We need to be a lot more deliberate and get a lot better at integrating efforts to improve the well-being of women and girls. Given the siloed nature of how we organize development work, especially in terms of funding and specialized expertise, we tend to think and act with narrowly predetermined notions of cause and effect. As a result, we miss vital connections and opportunities for action and impact. For example, I recently asked an African Minister of Health what was the biggest obstacle to women’s and girls’ health, and he immediately responded, “access to transport” to get to health facilities and obtain medicines. And yet, how often does transport come up as a priority when funders and development agencies plan health programs?

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  • March 31, 2016

    A conversation on ending extreme poverty

    Written by
    Patrick Fine, Chief Executive Officer, FHI 360

    What will it take to eradicate extreme poverty?

    I sat down with Carla Koppell, Vice President for the Center for Applied Conflict Transformation at the United States Institute of Peace to discuss the U.S. Agency for International Development’s (USAID) ambitious Vision to End Extreme Poverty. A former Chief Strategy Officer at USAID, Koppell shares her insight on how the international development community can turn vision into reality.

    Why focus on extreme poverty? How do strategies for addressing extreme poverty differ in states with weak institutions? How do we balance getting rapid results with strengthening local capacity? These are just a few of the topics we dive into as we search for ways to turn ideas into action.

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