May 2019

Unleashing Private Capital for Global Health Innovation

We need significantly more innovation – and funding to support that innovation – if we are to successfully achieve our global health aspirations. CII released a new report Unleashing Private Capital for Global Health Innovation, which aims to understand both innovator challenges in successfully attracting private capital to scale their solutions, and investor challenges to deploying more private capital in the global health sector. Read the report.

Design for Health: Nio Far Dakar

Last month, alongside the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, we co-hosted the 2019 DesignforHealth convening Nio Far Dakar in Dakar, Senegal at the Le Musée des Civilisations Noires (Museum of Black Civilisations). The DesignforHealth partnership seeks to advance the more intentional and appropriate use of design in global health, while democratizing design so that it is more accessible to global health practitioners at large. At this convening, nearly 100 attendees made up of designers, implementing partners, and funders tackled the question: as global health evolves over the next 25 years, how can design be best positioned to be integrated within the field while accelerating human-centered innovation to improve the health of populations? Learn more and watch this video for highlights of the event. As the Senegalese say, Nio Far! We are on, we are together!

Saving Lives at Birth Xcelerator Workshop

The 2019 Saving Lives at Birth (SL@B) Xcelerator Workshop, led by the Accelerating SL@B program consortium of partners, was held in Durham, NC May 13-17th. The Xcelerator is an interactive 4.5-day workshop that is designed to amplify the impact of the SL@B grant program by providing targeted, tailored assistance to its innovations to reach scale and sustainability with evidence of impact. In attendance were over 40 innovators representing 12 countries. Each day focused on one of four key domain challenges critical to growth, adoption, and sustainable scale of an innovation: team, market, business model, and product/service/approach.

Global Health Grand Challenge Innovators in the News

Last month, the World Bank announced the first place winner of the ‘Mission Billion Challenge’: Simprints, a Saving Lives at Birth innovator. Simprints won for its open source toolkit that uses audio messages during registration to help people provide meaningful informed consent and to understand how their data is going to be used. Over 170 solutions were submitted from 54 countries from academics, entrepreneurs, scientists, and technologists. Simprints was featured in an NPR Planet Money podcast for their recent win.

In addition, Global Health Grand Challenge innovators University of Melbourne, supported by Saving Lives at Birth, and Monash University, supported by the Combating Zika Grand Challenge, are two of the twelve finalists out of a pool of nearly 1K applications for the Macquarie 50th Anniversary Award. This award will select 5 of the 12 finalists to receive $10M in funding to deliver projects that seek to initiate or build on a bold idea that addresses an area of social need.