Driving a culture of innovation in global health

Sourced from interviews with 25+ innovators, our latest report provides specific ways for Gavi and the Global Fund to leverage innovation to deliver results

Dear Unlock Aid community,

TL;DR: Timed to coincide with this week’s World Health Summit, we’re publishing a report on ways the world’s largest global health agencies can leverage innovation to prevent pandemics and improve public health.

These recommendations are tailored to a global health context, but many of them can be generalized to any public institution that wants to build a culture of innovation to solve hard problems. So, whether you consider yourself a public health expert or not, we hope you take a look.

Unlock Aid started as a research project

In 2021, we asked more than 60 world-class innovators what kept them from working with the world’s largest public sector development agencies. We then built a coalition of 100+ organizations to take action on what we learned. In the years since our founding, we’ve unlocked nearly $300 million for social innovators, changed government procurement rules, and shifted the conversation in Washington, DC about the opportunity to reimagine a new future for global development. We need development models that do more to promote sustainable economic growth, leverage innovation, and shift more decision making power and resources to local communities.

Now we’re broadening our focus

While we focused our earliest efforts on the U.S. government, we knew there were opportunities to affect change at other global development agencies, too, including many of the world’s leading multilateral banks, UN agencies, and global financing facilities.

Today, we’re proud to release our latest report: Unlocking Downstream Innovation to Improve Health Outcomes: Recommendations for Gavi and the Global Fund from innovators on a reimagined way forward. Written by lead author and innovation expert Shiro Wachira, the report synthesizes insights from interviews with 25+ of the leading innovators that have experience working with the world’s two largest global health agencies: Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance and the Global Fund to Defeat AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria.

Here's the good news

Amid shrinking official development assistance budgets and growing health challenges, both Gavi and the Global Fund understand that they need to invest more to identify and scale up innovations and novel approaches that can cut costs, speed up service delivery, and improve health outcomes. 

Gavi has even proposed creating a multi-hundred-million-dollar Innovation Scale Up Fund to bring to scale the very best solutions that it has previously supported via its earlier-stage Infuse innovation initiative, for example. This kind of Scale Up Fund would begin to fix the “missing middle” funding gap that deters so many world-class innovators from working more closely with the public sector to deliver more impactful and sustainable health outcomes. 

Both agencies also want to devolve more decision-making power to those communities closest to the challenges.

This report does not argue for innovation for innovation's sake. Amid a complex geopolitical and funding environment where needs are going up but public budgets are trending down, delivering long-term and sustainable impact will depend upon our public institutions’ abilities to adapt their business models. Across the board, public institutions need to build cultures of innovation that embrace experimentation with new approaches and new actors, tolerate acceptable levels of risk given the potential upsides of success, and that ultimately accept accountability for delivering ambitious results. This report points to concrete ways to do that.

Here's where we need your help

We’ve identified areas where both agencies are doing well, as well as where both can do better, but we know there are other ideas and insights that we did not capture. So, please, read the report. Let us know what we missed. What else should we incorporate?

We released this report at last week’s Impact First Summit, where many of the world’s top global health innovators gathered to share the latest advances in their work. Now we’re publishing it during this week’s World Health Summit. This is just the beginning of a conversation with innovators, the agencies, and you about where we need to go.

As our track record shows, when we decide to take on an issue, we’re determined to make change happen. So, we hope you take seriously the opportunity to influence our thinking. And if you’re an innovator, we hope this report can also be a useful guidebook to help you navigate one or both agencies, or to use for talking points in your own advocacy.

To Progress,
Unlock Aid