A panel of global health practitioners — including MCSP’s Senior Newborn Specialist/Nigeria, Olayinka Umar-Farouk — met for an event December 5th: “READY, SET, LAUNCH – A country-Level Launch Planning Guide for Global Health Innovations.” The Aspen Institute’s Global Health and Development Program and USAID’s Center for Accelerating Innovation and Impact (CII) hosted the event, the latest in CII’s IDEA TO IMPACT series.
The event, held at The Aspen Institute in Washington, D.C., highlighted the complications of scaling up global health innovations. Innovators, manufacturers, implementers and donors shared their experiences introducing global health innovations grounded in the lessons from READY, SET, LAUNCH and discussed how best to put its principles to use.
Panelists stressed the myriad activities, countries and actors required to scale up the growing number of lifesaving global health innovations. They also discussed successes, including the dramatic reduction in child mortality over the past two decades thanks in part to significant advancements in how global health products are developed, introduced and scaled.
The Planning Guide brings a sharp focus to this critical pivot from global product development to targeted country selection and launch planning. It provides high-level guidance through three steps : 1) country prioritization; 2) strategy development; and 3) implementation planning.
Umar-Farouk, who discussed MCSP’s efforts to scale up chlorhexidine and other initiatives, stressed the need for planning the right metrics before scaling up. She illuminated how launching and scaling global health innovations are not linear processes, and enforced that failures are inevitable and require corrective actions. She called this failure “failing forward,” and said it was an integral component of the learning process.
