Managing Global Health: Design, Delivery and Evaluation of Global Health Programs

Course Number 2230

Assistant Professor Nava Ashraf
Winter, 20 Sessions
Paper

Career Focus

This course is designed for students who seek entrepreneurial or management roles in global development, and particularly in global health.

Educational Objectives

Managing Global Health (MGH) trains and enables prospective managers and entrepreneurs to meet three of the largest challenges in global development:

1. How do we promote behavior change? Appropriate design of products, services and programs, drawing from social marketing and behavioral economics;
   
2. How do we make sure vitally needed products and services get to those who need them? Effective delivery, including the use of the private sector and market mechanisms such as prices and incentives; and
   
3. How do we know that we've made a difference? Rigorous impact evaluation, with particular attention to randomized control trials in the field.
   

There will be a heavy emphasis on skills development with applications in global health, but also applicable for programs in microfinance, agriculture, education and other social services delivery.

Through exposure to major practitioner challenges, with guest lecturers from the field, and engagement with cutting edge research in public health and economics, students will learn to bridge the worlds of research and action, in order to creatively and skillfully make an impact in global health.

Content and Organization

MGH begins with an overview of the major managerial challenges in global health, and an introduction to the dynamics of the course, which involve engaging across disciplines and with research and researchers to create evidence-based change.

Students will take on group projects, each of which addresses design, delivery and evaluation of a promising program, product or service. These group projects can involve collaboration with researchers and field organizations affiliated with the course (including NGOs, government ministries, and private sector organizations).

The course consists of the following three Modules, each motivated by pressing questions in the field and each drawing on cutting edge research to help us answer them:

I. Design
Why do households not use water purification solution in the face of life-threatening cholera and diarrhea? Why do they not bring their children for vaccination, even when it's free? How do we promote the use, not just the possession, of vitally needed health products and services?

Health is an outcome which relies as much on the consumer to use than on the supplier to deliver. Thus every health product or service must grapple with the question of adoption, which requires appropriate and innovative design. In this Module, we will discuss cases from Social Marketing, with guest experts from the field, and research from Behavioral Economics to understand consumer decision making in this space, and how to appropriately design health products and services that can affect behavior change.

II. Deliver
Even if we've designed a great health product or service, what is the best way to deliver it? To what extent can we draw on private distribution channels? Can we use private sector models of prices and incentives to deliver health products and services? If not, how can they be adapted for the public health sector? How do we overcome the main delivery bottlenecks in health delivery? This Module discusses the role of intermediaries and scale up in delivery channels, as well as the role of prices for health products and incentives for delivery agents. This Module will welcome several guest lecturers who have grappled with and come to innovative solutions for global health services delivery.

III. Evaluate
A well-designed and effectively delivered product and service should have impact- did yours? This Module will discuss how to demonstrate impact through rigorous evaluation, both for outside partners and stakeholders and for your own strategic planning. Students will learn the factors that can confound causal inference in evaluation studies, so that they can ask: what do we really know from the evidence about what works in global health, and what of this is actionable? This is the most skills-based part of the course, involving several classes of technical tool-kit building in randomized evaluation, which provides a gold-standard for causal inference.