By Anna Miller
A girl born today in southern Sudan is more likely to die in childbirth than to complete a secondary education.
The example is shocking, but it’s also one that Raj Shah, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, believes offers an explanation for the growing number of young people interested global health.
“We live in a world that is more fundamentally interconnected than it ever has been,” he said to an overflow crowd at the Marvin Center, Sept. 30. “And you know that we cannot expect to be safe and stable and prosperous in an environment [where that is the case].”
Dr. Shah delivered the keynote address at the 11th annual Global Health Mini-University, a day-long symposium co-sponsored by USAID and the GW Center for Global Health.
Per Dr. Shah’s point, attendance for the event — which was free and open to the public — exceeded 1,300, an increase of about 20 percent from last year.
“With such a remarkable event put together on a shoestring, it makes you wonder what would happen with the whole shoe,” commented Jim Sherry, chair of SPHHS’s Department of Global Health and director of the GW Center for Global Health. Dr. Sherry proposed that, in the future, the mini-university be webcast so even more people can participate.
The event offered nearly 70 seminars on emerging research and best practices across the field of global health. Topics ranged from the importance of nutrition in the earliest stages of development to the role of new technologies in global health initiatives to corruption in the health sector, and were led by experts from various governmental and non-governmental agencies and universities including Population Services International, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the World Bank and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Dr. Shah’s appearance marked the first time a USAID administrator attended the mini-university. In his address, he discussed his administration’s priorities, which are driven by the goal of “saving the most lives the most effectively,” he said. In order to do that, he added, diseases must be addressed as a part of an integrated whole, rather than as unrelated problems.
Specifically, Dr. Shah presented USAID’s goal to reduce the number of children under the age of five who die each year worldwide. “We can save 40 percent of those 8 million kids with simple, cost-effective, proven and known strategies,” he said. The global distribution of vaccines, the implementation of malaria prevention techniques and the continued outreach against HIV/AIDS can all help make the goal a reality within the next five to seven years, he said.
“Those simple things…are some of the best investments we can make anywhere around the world to improve the lot of the most vulnerable,” he added.
Dr. Shah also expressed his administration’s commitment to maternal health, an area he said has historically suffered from “dramatic underinvestment.” By improving access to skilled birth attendants, for example, 30 percent of the 300,000 women who die each year in childbirth can be saved, he said.
Improvements in HIV, malaria and tuberculosis prevention and treatment are also on USAID’s agenda. Dr. Shah said decision makers and advocates must be “willing to be courageous about bringing new technologies and strategies into the field more aggressively and more efficiently.”
Dr. Shah encouraged the attendees — many of whom were public health students or young professionals— to maintain “the basic commitment to save the most lives in the least fortunate settings on the planet.”
“We’re forced sometimes to react to the loudest advocacy groups or to be most responsive to the politics in the moment, but you…can help us set a new tone,” he said. “You can learn about these issues earlier in the course of your careers as you are doing today, you can become a voice for change and for effectiveness for greater investment and for a more sane approach to how we tend to talk about and think about our work in global health.”