Lessons for scaling global health success from the World Health Assembly

The Exemplars in Global Health (EGH) team experienced several "firsts" at the recent World Health Assembly in Geneva in May. Notably, it was the first time since we launched EGH in 2020 that were able to hold extensive in-person meetings with national leaders and in-country partners – and celebrate our collective successes.

The novelty of being together in person with ministers of health, global and regional partner executives, and implementers, was quickly replaced by our recognition of the importance of the global gathering and conversations about how we might move global health forward. We not only shared our common goals and discussed our complementary roles in improving global health, we also affirmed the value of identifying and researching positive outliers to relay learnings with others seeking to make similar improvements in their own countries or communities. For our part, we shared examples of real-life EGH successes, such as when Lucy Kimondo, the Deputy Director of Population at the National Council for Population and Development in Kenya and member of the Exemplars in Global Health Senior Advisory Board, used lessons from Exemplars research on stunting in Peru to help her create an advocacy strategy for eliminating adolescent pregnancy in Kenya.

When we identify solutions, we can support in-country experts in applying lessons that, far from being the result of imposed policy, have been co-created by stakeholders themselves.

We believe that local ownership matters – not just for those synthesizing lessons from positive outliers, but also for those who will then apply those lessons to other contexts. Many leaders told us that, within their own countries, there was an increasing desire to identify their own subnational positive outliers to guide policymaking in other areas.

Interestingly, we heard some attendees wondering out loud why certain countries had not been identified as an exemplar in X topic or Y solution. As someone who leads our partnerships and impact work, those questions were my favorite for how much they revealed: a healthy competition within and between countries to identify and share their best practices. The truth is there are positive outliers in global health in almost every unit of analysis – villages, communities, districts, states, and countries. And while part of our work is to help find and study a representative sample of these outliers, we know this is just a start. We are always open to studying new topics and places, based on suggestions we receive from countries and partners.

As happens at all good meetings, we were also challenged. Some people engaging with EGH for the first time said they needed to better understand our offering to consider partnering with us to find new exemplars. This means we must continue reaching out to health leaders and partners to help drive demand for our collaborative research.

For countries where we do not yet have a footprint, we will have to rely on creatively building our partner networks and cocreate relationships that deliver results.

Finally, we discussed with many of the attendees the importance of creating relationships with senior- to mid-level managers who are politically independent. That way, when governments – or even agendas – change, our work can continue.

Exemplars in Global Health is a research co-creator and network facilitator, and exists to identify lessons, promote ideas, and further applicable solutions. And though we are not a direct funder of in-country health programs and instead, a direct funder of research, I left Geneva more convinced than ever that our offering is just as valuable. Because our positive outlier methodology is being used to support strategy and decision-making, which in turn helps countries make better use of donor funds and deliver a higher return on financial investments.

I used to love the proverb that if you give a person a fish, you can feed them for a day but if you teach them to fish, they can feed themselves for a lifetime. But in reality, it’s not the best proverb. Because if we can learn directly from those fishing how they caught the most fish, we can bring those lessons to other rivers and feed entire villages.