Innovation + Impact E-newsletter June 2021

Join Global Health on Follow CII on June 2021 FEATURE   Project Last Mile Partnership Pivots to COVID-19 CII and the Office of HIV/AIDs (OHA) recently announced that USAID's role in the Project Last Mile (PLM) partnership has been extended until 2026. PLM is a pioneering public-private partnership between USAID, The Coca-Cola Company and its Foundation, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, The Global Fund, and PEPFAR that leverages the private sector expertise and business intelligence of the Coca-Cola system to improve access to life-saving medicines through supply chain and strategic marketing support throughout the African continent. PLM collaborates with regional Coca-Cola bottlers and suppliers to strengthen public health systems capacity by sharing the private sector expertise and network of the Coca-Cola System with Ministries of Health and partners through a co-creation process.  In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, PLM has pivoted to support Ministries of Health and partners with COVID-19 related programming. Support includes operational and strategic planning for vaccine roll-out, including route-to-market design for storage and transportation of vaccines for effective and efficient distribution; design and execution of preventive maintenance and repair models for cold chain; assessing the feasibility of leveraging the Coca-Cola System's liquid CO2 for dry ice production and support of vaccines requiring ultra-cold chain; and, applying strategic marketing targeted at vaccine information. To date, PLM partners have supported work in Eswatini, Ghana, Lesotho, Liberia, Mozambique, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Tanzania, and Uganda.                 DIGITAL HEALTH     HBR Highlights how LMICs are Innovating to Combat COVID CII's Senior Digital Health Advisor Merrick Schaefer co-authored an article in the Harvard Business Review (HBR) titled How Low and Middle-Income Countries Are Innovating to Combat Covid. Schaefer and his co-authors Ben Ramalingam, Benjamin Kumpf, and Rahul Malhotra, discuss various approaches and lessons learned, including ensuring that solutions are sensitive to social and cultural dynamics, and discovering novelty through permutations, substitutions, and combinations. The article showcases examples of innovations that originated in Low and Middle Income Countries (LMICs), including Digital Health ones that USAID helped support, such as the enterprise approach the USAID mission in Ethiopia has taken across its supply chain and surveillance systems.         Worker makes portable AgVa ventilators during the lockdown for the COVID response in Noida, India.   Sunil Ghosh/Hindustan Times via Getty Images   INNOVATION     Innovator Gradian Announces New Partnership in Nepal Gradian Health Systems, a Saving Lives at Birth Grand Challenge winner,  formed a new partnership with Nepal's National Innovation Center (NIC) and the America Nepal Medical Foundation (ANMF). Gradian produces both the Universal Anesthesia Machine (UAM) and the Comprehensive Care Ventilator (CCV), both of which can operate without reliable access to Oxygen and/or electricity. The new partnership will distribute 50 CCVs, training, and biomedical support to strengthen critical care services in nine hospitals, including Bir Hospital and Civil Hospital in Kathmandu. More details here. INNOVATION     Innovator World Mosquito Program shown to reduce dengue by 77%   World Mosquito Program (WMP), a winner of the Zika Grand Challenge, just published an article in The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) demonstrating very promising results of a randomized control trial that drastically reduced dengue transmission. WMP is an international not-for-profit initiative that uses mosquitos infected with Wolbachia, a common bacteria, to block disease transmission by Aedes Aegypti mosquitoes, which carry dengue, Zika, Chikungunya, and yellow fever. The NEJM article showed that the release of Wolbachia-carrying mosquitoes in selected neighborhoods of the Indonesian city of Yogyakarta reduced dengue cases by 77% and dengue-related hospitalizations by 86%. Wolbachia also proved effective against all four dengue serotypes.       VIRTUAL EVENTS July 1, 2021 Aspen Ideas Festival Aspen Ideas                                                                                                                                                                                         July 7, 2021 Accelerating Climate Science with AI AI for Good                                                                                                                                                                                         August 18, 2021 Digital Health and Data Science Innovation: Enabling New Models of Care Globally Innovations in Healthcare CII NEWS Harvard Business Review How Low and Middle-Income Countries Are Innovating to Combat Covid June 9, 2021  BBC 'Miraculous' mosquito hack cuts dengue by 77% June 10, 2021 USAID South Africa: Partnering for the Long Term Means Quick Action on COVID-19 June 24, 2021  NEWS Science Magazine Mixing COVID-19 vaccines appears to boost immune responses June 9, 2021 Pacific Standard How women provide an 'invisible subsidy' to the world's healthcare systems June 14, 2021 Science Daily Developing countries pay steep economic and health costs because of high car air pollution June 16, 2021 New York Times Parents and caregivers reported mental health issues more often than others during the pandemic, a C.D.C. study says June 17, 2021  WHAT WE'RE READING Rockwool Foundation:  Building Better Systems: A Green Paper on System Innovation  International Monetary Fund Miles To Go: Emerging markets must balance overcoming the pandemic, returning to more normal policies, and rebuilding their economies  Bond Racism, Power and Truth: Experiences of people of colour in development Think Global Health Preventing Pandemics and Ending Malaria Demand New Investments in Community Health                                                                             FUNDING/RECOGNITION OPPORTUNITIES                   Blended Finance for Maternal, Child and Newborn Health in Bangladesh Request for Proposals  Fund for Innovation in Development Application Form FT and IFC Transformational Business Awards  Application Form                                                                                                                                                                                CII Innovator Spotlight       Dr. Data Santorino, Senior Lecturer  Mbarara University of Science and Technology At Mbarara University of Science and Technology (MUST), Data works as a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Pediatrics and Child Health, the Director of CAMTech Uganda, and provides leadership at the MUST Medical Simulation Center. Data is the founding director of the Center for Innovation and Technology Transfer of MUST. MUST is the Africa home for the Consortium for Affordable Medical Technologies (CAMTech).  Data's team has closely worked with the USAID Center for Innovation and Impact (CII) in the development, testing and scale planning for the Augmented Infant Resuscitator (AIR). The AIR device is a universal add-on device to existing resuscitation devices that provides instant feedback on quality of newborn ventilation. Read Data's full interview here. The Center for Innovation and Impact (CII) applies innovative, market-based, and digital health approaches to accelerate impact against critical health issues. CII incubates new ideas, puts them into practice, and scales effective approaches with diverse partnerships.     Stay Connected with USAID Global Health         Unsubscribe | Update Your E-mail Address | USAID.gov | Privacy Policy   If you have questions or problems with the subscription service, please contact subscriberhelp.govdelivery.com. Ogilvy is sending these announcements on behalf of USAID's Bureau for Global Health. Ogilvy is located at 1111 19th St. NW, Washington, DC 20036 • (202) 729-4000