Featured

  • Disrupters: Strengthening health systems through authentic partnerships

    Strengthening health systems comes down to staff, stuff, space, systems and support. Whether providing primary care or responding to deadly outbreaks of infectious diseases, a holistic approach that places the patient and their community at the center of care and treatment is essential. In this episode, Dr. Paul Farmer and I discuss how human connection and authentic partnership should remain at the center of public health and human development work.

    Dr. Paul Farmer is the Co-Founder, Chief Strategist and Chair of the Board of Trustees of Partners in Health, and a medical anthropologist, physician and author. His most recent book is Fevers, Feuds, and Diamonds: Ebola and the Ravages of History. His positive approach to disrupting under-resourced and poorly performing health systems is simple yet holistic: Address unmet needs for staff, stuff, space, systems and support.

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  • A star is born: Getting health products to people is a multipronged journey

    Recently, a question was circulated on social media: How do you draw a star?

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  • Disrupters: Building bridges, confronting historic oppression in the United States

    The decolonization movement offers new ways to understand our work in human development at home and abroad. In this episode, I speak with Edgar Villanueva, author of Decolonizing Wealth: Indigenous Wisdom to Heal Divides and Restore Balance, Founder of the Decolonizing Wealth Project, and Senior Vice President of Programs and Advocacy at the Schott Foundation. 

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  • Social media connects girls and shared experiences with HIV prevention

    The Cookie Jar is a Facebook group run by FHI 360’s Accelerating Progress in Communities (APC 2.0) project to support young women in Botswana in shifting social and gender norms. Members talk about issues like HIV risks, gaps in knowledge about infections and access to treatment. Typically, young women like me do not use HIV services despite risks of infection or violence in relationships. In Botswana, many young women engage in intergenerational and transactional sex. The Cookie Jar provides a place for young women to seek information, find out how to get care and receive peer support.

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  • The Full Picture: Accurately Framing COVID-19 Vaccine “Hesitancy” among Black Americans

    As Black American public health professionals, we know that one pervasive question for Black Americans today is, “So, are you getting the COVID vaccine?”

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  • It’s been twenty-six years since the International Conference on Population and Development affirmed women’s reproductive health as an essential human right. In this episode of A Deeper Look, I sit down with Ann Starrs, Director of Family Planning at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, to hear how new products, policies and practices are disrupting the family planning landscape and offering greater access and better outcomes for users.

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  • COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy: The problem ahead

    Vaccines are here! The end of the pandemic is in sight! There is light at the end of the tunnel! Wait a minute. Is that really a light or the next more challenging phase of the pandemic speeding toward us? After more than a year of lockdown and restrictions, all of us have grown weary of the struggle and should be racing to get vaccinated. But we are not.

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  • The clock is ticking: Tuberculosis and diabetes in the COVID-19 era

    The COVID-19 pandemic has created a seismic upheaval in global health care and individual health testing and treatment. Previous gains in reducing life-threatening chronic diseases are being eroded by the need to turn attention and resources to the pandemic. It feels like a “Snakes and Ladders” board game: The counter has landed on the head of a snake and programs for other diseases have slid to the bottom of the board, landing many years behind.

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  • Confronting dilemmas in humanitarian response

    Wealthy nations are now fragile states. Climate change poses an existential threat to humanity. And, the damage done by a global pandemic is not yet fully known but has already erased a decade of progress in the fight against extreme poverty. We are living in a world where crises are proliferating and take much longer to resolve. Some never end.

    My guest for this episode of A Deeper Look, Heba Aly, is drawing attention to the many forces disrupting the world and the implications for us all. Heba is the Director of the New Humanitarian, host of the podcast Rethinking Humanitarianism, and a career journalist. Heba is questioning everything from the power dynamics in aid to the increasingly intertwined nature of humanitarian response and development.

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  • Quality, not quantity, should define development

    2020 will go down in history as a year of global health, economic and social crises occurring against the backdrop of increasingly catastrophic climate events. It is a year that defines disruption. However, as we jump into 2021, I’m taking a cue from last season’s development optimists to look for how to convert crisis into opportunity. This year, I will explore with my guests how they see us leveraging disruption for good in a post-COVID world.

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