Weekly Round-Up 30 March

My intention was to do a weekly round-up each week, but an electricity outage this weekend destroyed my best intentions.  So I’m making up for lost time and am rounding-up last week on Tuesday.  Apologies! 

Here’s just a few snippets of the best stuff I’ve read this week in Global Health.

• Advocating Health as a strategy for “Smart Power”: Eric Green at Change.org posted “4 Ideas for Smart Global Health” in which he described Smart Power as the Goldilocks of contemporary thinking on American power.  The crux?  The assertion that Americans should be both soft and hard, and promoting global health is a “soft” strategy for ensuring national security.  My favorite conclusion, though, is that the US should “double down” on investments that target women and children as a catalyst for inspiring results.

• International Reactions to Passage of US Health Reform: Laurie Garrett at CFR.org has done an excellent job capturing the international beffudlement over the US healthcare debate in “Health Reform Vote: Global Impressions“.  She makes the case that many international audiences saw the legislative wrangling as an unwelcome distraction from important issues, such as nuclear disarmament, economic recovery, and two wars.  But mostly the bewilderment is derived from astonishment that the world’s richest country would allow 1/6th of its population to go without health coverage. 

• GAVI goes for the gold: GAVI hosted its first high-level meeting for financing earlier this weeek on March 26th, seeking $2.6 billion to fund vaccines, which it projects will avert 4.2 million deaths if implemented.  This is really just the next segment in a pretty riveting saga which is changing the landscape for global health funding – a true “marriage” of the most significant funders, deploying some very innovative financing mechanisms, as described last July by Ruth Levine at Center for Global Development.

• How to Cultivate Change:  Sean Stannard-Stockton at Tactical Philanthropy reported on Monitor Institute’s new report, “The Future of Philanthropy“.  Ok, it’s not purely about Global Health, but since much of public health is foundation-funded, I think this is a logical leap.  I think the best coming out of this report is the claim that social enterprises can act bigger by understanding their eco-system, a theory/strategy that is also proposed by Mark Kramer at FSG Impact Advisors.

• And finally, because food is a part of health too: Tom Philpot at Grist.com reminds us that food policy is a close relative of health policy in “What can the health-care act teach the food movement?”; portion sizes have dramatically increased in the last 1000 years, according to an analysis of The Last Supper paintings; and a Happy Meal still looks great after it’s 1-year birthday.