3 Takeaways from the Exemplars in Global Health Partner Summit

Seven years ago, Exemplars in Global Health (EGH) was born on the back of a napkin. Since then, we've built a global coalition of hundreds of partners dedicated to figuring out which countries have made leaps in solving health challenges – and what others can learn from them.

While each year we’ve expanded our body of research, 2024 was without a doubt a banner year for the program. We shared our positive outlier methodology with emerging public health leaders from across Africa, engaged health decision-makers via workshops around the world, and launched a new resource, the neonatal and maternal health benchmarking tool, to enable leaders to explore the data for themselves. We also deepened our collaboration with government partners like Senegal’s Ministry of Health and Social Action to support their work in strengthening health systems.

“The partnership with Exemplars in Global Health enabled us to identify best practices in family planning and anemia – while contributing to stronger policy development and program implementation,” said Dr. Babacar Gueye, Director of Planning, Research and Statistics at Senegal’s Ministry of Health and Social Action.

On January 30, 2025, we held our annual partner summit to hear from our network of expert in-country researchers on some of their latest findings, as well as on the tools, data, and support the program offers to accelerate health progress. With more than 120 individuals from around the world in attendance, one fact is clear: our global partnerships are driving global impact.

Below are three key takeaways from the summit on what’s working in global health:

• Local context matters.

  Across each of the EGH topic areas, our research has shown that taking tailored approaches to health issues can propel extraordinary gains. At the partner summit, EGH experts on malaria and vaccine confidence explained the importance of understanding local context.

  • Malaria: Dr. Abdisalan Noor of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Applied Health Analytics for Delivery & Innovation (AHADI) highlighted the role of subnational tailoring (SNT) in reducing the malaria burden across Burkina Faso, Lao PDR, Mozambique, Nigeria, and Tanzania. SNT uses local data on everything from climate to entomology to formulate context-specific approaches to halting transmission of the disease.
  • Vaccine confidence: Dr. Karell G. Pellé of the Institut Pasteur de Dakar discussed her work to boost vaccine confidence in Senegal, which will begin with a subnational household survey. Taking a granular approach to understanding which factors correlate with different levels of vaccine confidence can inform evidence-based policymaking.

• Education has powerful ripple effects.

  New research on family planning and adolescent sexual and reproductive health and rights shows how education strategies – especially for women and girls – helped advance health improvements.

  • Family planning: EGH researchers Dr. Zahid Memon of Aga Khan University and Sacha St-Onge Ahmad of SickKids Center for Global Child Health, identified education as a key driver of family planning progress. The Exemplar countries they studied all invested in girls' education, which correlated with higher use of modern contraceptives among young women. The links between education and family planning were especially strong in Bolivia, which established education as a fundamental right for all in 2010.
  • Adolescent sexual and reproductive health: Dr. Naa Dodoo of the African Institute for Development Policy (AFIDEP) found that reducing adolescent fertility and improving health outcomes hinged in large part on expanding access to health information among young people. To this end, Nepal has made significant strides in delivering comprehensive sexuality education. More than 700 teachers and 500 peer educators have been trained to provide this programming, and sex education was also made compulsory for students in grades 9 and 10.

• Data allows for better decision-making.

  When policymakers have the right data at their fingertips, they make better decisions that have a greater impact. At the summit, researchers shared examples of where efforts to gather and share timely, specific data drove positive changes.

  • Community health worker programs: Dr. Divya Nair and Joseph Sesay of Last Mile Health presented findings from a low-cost performance monitoring system that they implemented in Sierra Leone to track its community health worker (CHW) program’s progress over time. Using recruitment data collected from 8,000 CHWs, district-level phone survey data, and other data collection mechanisms, they identified gaps and designed solutions. For example, the performance data led to the development of a supervision tool that will help government officials provide CHWs with the support they need. Last Mile Health is also working on a CHW map that will enable optimal allocation of CHWs geographically.
  • Maternal and newborn health: Dr. Anaclet Ngabonzima of the World Health Organization explained how Burundi made use of an EGH-developed, four-step interactive benchmarking tool to help the country set priorities related to maternal and newborn health. Through data visualization, the tool identified both high- and low-performing areas, which allowed government leaders to better understand the gaps and challenges.

Our summit concluded on a note of hope with Bill Gates, who remarked, “We need a lot more exchange on a regional level so people can learn from who is doing the very best work. Reaching across country boundaries is what we are trying to foster.”

We are incredibly proud of the work we’ve accomplished with our partners. Together, we’re informing the way countries implement solutions – by learning from what works elsewhere – helping to build a brighter, healthier future for all.