Welcome to Exemplars News

News. Its definition, per the Oxford Dictionary, is “new information about something that has happened recently.” But alongside COVID-19, the world has also deeply struggled with another kind of pandemic: one of disinformation.

When I think about the 1918 flu pandemic, I wonder how events would have unfolded had the internet been available to large swaths of the global population in pocket-sized devices. Today, our access to an overabundance of information has created an environment in which dangerous opinion, masquerading as scientific fact, can spread faster than viruses. In the past year, we have seen that kind of disinformation politicizing masks, creating fear around COVID-19 vaccines, and even inflaming racial or nationalistic tensions. Add that to the ease of sharing a story with the simple push of a button, and a parallel pandemic is formed. The World Health Organization, the United Nations, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies and others have called it a tsunami-like infodemic.

In some ways, that abundance of bad information is one reason we're launching Exemplars News today. But, more than this, Exemplars News will also be a celebration of a bigger story: the success of health experts in the Global South who are delivering exceptional progress in key health indicators.

We launched the Exemplars in Global Health platform a year ago to help global health experts uncover lessons from positive outlier countries and share them, so they could be adapted elsewhere, and scaled everywhere. By systematically identifying those positive outliers across varied settings and geographies, our goal was equal parts simple and ambitious: determining the best practices that governments and funders can adopt and adapt to strengthen their health systems and expedite progress in their own backyards.

Over the past 12 months, we have published extensive research from countries that have made extraordinary progress in health, outperforming their peers beyond what would be expected from their economic growth. Our topic areas have ranged from stunting to under-five mortality, from community health worker programs to epidemics and the COVID-19 response. We have shared stories of success in countries as varied in geography, culture, and historical context as Peru and Bangladesh, or Ethiopia and the Kyrgyz Republic. We have explained our findings on why specific problems have been difficult to solve, and both what works, and what likely will not. And we have also broadened the lens of our research by inviting some of the most experienced and well-regarded authorities in global health to share their perspectives on challenges and solutions they have faced – and solved – at home.

Exemplars in Global Health is both a resource and an invitation. The former, for others to explore and extract solid data and findings. The latter, for anyone to see how strategies of success can be adapted to their particular circumstances.

Exemplars News will notably present the human side to the great work being done by our researchers, partners, and in-country experts, and introduce you to some of the people who benefit. It is our way of complementing our research with real-life stories of how exemplars are creating change.

In an information era that can be defined by disinformation, Exemplars News – like Exemplars in Global Health – also has several simple yet ambitious goal. To allow you to see how policies and programs are working. To show you the faces of change. And to shine a light on the successes that are often overlooked by the mass media.

It does not mean Exemplars News will circumvent the often-challenging realities inherent to so many LMICs where we work. Rather, it will show decision-makers that even where challenges are rife, progress is more than just possible. It can be evidence-based and proven. It may be able to be scaled. But above all, it has a face and a name.

We hope you enjoy Exemplars News and share the stories you find useful so they can inspire others to catalyze similar progress wherever they are.