Launching the Health Progress Hub (and how you can help us!)

TL;DR

Global Policy Research Group (GPRG) is launching an initiative to accelerate progress on neglected but pressing global health issues through policy advocacy.

In the last 6 months, we spoke^[1] with several high-impact global health organizations and experts, who shared that finding “top local talent” in target countries (mostly Low- and Middle-Income Countries) is a significant challenge. In response, we are building a new initiative called “Health Progress Hub” to address infrastructure gaps in global health policy.

What are we doing currently? And how can you help us?

Ecosystem Assessment Survey: We are conducting a more comprehensive ecosystem assessment survey. This assessment aims to verify our initial observations and identify the most pressing talent (and infrastructure) needs in the field.

If you are working at a health policy organization and would like to provide input (and/or would like to receive support), you can fill in this form!

Pilot Program: Designing a 10-week pilot policy advocacy training program in partnership with Fortify Health, Lead Exposure Elimination Project (LEEP), and the Alliance to Reduce Antimicrobial Resistance (ARMoR).

The program is designed to build participants’ skills in the most sought-after areas, introduce them to the most impactful topics in global health, and provide them with practical experience by working on projects of our partner organizations.

The program will have a 4-week training component, and a 6-week project component where trainees will be matched with projects from our partner organizations.
We are doing this pilot in order to test our curriculum, vetting procedure and project component structure. We also hope this gives us and our partner organizations a sense of the usefulness of fellows or trainees doing project work.

We plan to open applications for our pilot program in November. If you are a student or early-career professional interested in health policy, you can fill out our expression of interest form to receive an update when we open up applications.

For the pilot program, we welcome support and involvement in various ways. You can find more information and sign up through the following forms:

Become a teaching fellow, facilitator or hold a lecture/session
Become an advisor
Volunteer for social media management or knowledge management
Express interest in our pilot program as a potential fellow
Sign up for our newsletter to follow our build-in-public journey and help us tackle challenges we face
Provide one-off anonymous or non-anonymous feedback or suggestions on any aspect of our work
Support our initiative financially: We are currently a completely volunteer team. If you’re interested in funding our work, please reach out to berke@globalprg.org

We appreciate any level of involvement and look forward to collaborating with the community to accelerate progress in global health policy.

Challenges faced by health advocacy organizations

While global health organizations face numerous challenges, the ones listed below were highlighted frequently in our discussions and are those we think our established networks and expertise put us in a strong position to address.

Difficulty in finding top local talent: Global health (GH) policy organizations, especially those operating in Low-and-Middle-Income countries (LMICs), report facing significant hurdles in identifying and recruiting local talent for certain roles. ^[2]
Even local supporters without expertise or previous experience, can significantly accelerate an organization’s progress. For instance, EA Boğaziçi, a student group in Istanbul that I (Berke) led at the time, demonstrated this by assisting two organizations: We helped Lead Exposure Elimination Project launch their program in Türkiye several months ahead of schedule and provided support to Food Fortification Initiative’s existing efforts, enabling them to overcome their data collection bottleneck simply by leveraging our fluency in Turkish!
Weak local networks: Problems with finding local talent results in difficulty in tapping into local networks as local talent is crucial for building networks, engaging with key stakeholders (such as NGOs and government bodies), and navigating complex political contexts.
Explore-exploit dilemma: Given that high impact organizations work on global health challenges of enormous scale, they usually focus on increasing their impact by scaling established interventions or policies in countries they already work in.

These organizations often lack access to flexibly deployable talent for shorter term exploratory projects that could complement their core efforts. This requires not only a pre-vetted network of suitable and motivated people to help out, but also some possibility to outsource basic (project) management capacity. The lack of both these facilities hampers their ability to replicate successful strategies in new regions or to explore high-potential interventions within their focus areas without drawing significant resources away from current projects.
Limited On-ramps: There’s a scarcity of programs that guide (and support!) individuals interested in health policy advocacy and research^[3] towards the most pressing global health issues and cultivate effectiveness-oriented approaches. This gap slows progress on critical problems and perpetuates inefficient talent allocation.

Our approach and added value

Our current approach will consist of the following steps:

Assess the problem: We’ll refine our understanding of challenges through ecosystem assessment and research and validate our problem statement through an ecosystem survey of high impact health advocacy organizations.
Find and upskill local talent: Based on our assessment, we’ll tailor programs to support talent, particularly in priority Low-and-Middle Income countries (countries with a high burden of disease from issues best tackled through policy interventions where organizations express recruitment difficulties).
Bridge talent with organizations: For organizations wanting to replicate or expand programs in new geographic areas, we provide support matching them with vetted talent from those regions.
Provide project management support: We’ll offer project management support to organizations for projects where fellows are placed, reducing the management burden.

To learn more about our approach and vision, you can visit our Notion page

Why should an external organization do this?

We believe an external initiative may be better positioned to address these infrastructure gaps than the organizations themselves. This is a crucial premise for this initiative to be more impactful than the clear alternative of funding our partner organizations directly, which is especially important if we will be seeking funding otherwise allocated to impactful health advocacy directly. We believe this premise to hold for several reasons:

Cross-organizational perspective: We can identify common challenges across multiple organizations, enabling solutions that benefit the entire ecosystem.
Focused capacity: We can dedicate resources primarily to developing talent, network and infrastructure, unlike organizations primarily focused on policy implementation or advocacy.
Flexibility: Not being tied to a specific cause allows us to adapt as global health priorities evolve.
Resource efficiency: By creating shared resources and programs, we can provide value more cost-effectively than if organizations addressed these challenges independently. This is particularly the case for flexibly deployable talent. Organizations might have projects that someone could work on only part time and only for a fixed period, making it less attractive to hire a new person even though the project is valuable.
Risk tolerance for exploration: As an external initiative, we can dedicate resources to exploring promising but understudied interventions that individual organizations may find too risky or resource-intensive to pursue alongside their core work, for example, exploring the other sources of lead exposure.

By focusing on pressing issues that are holding high impact health policy advocacy organizations back, we aim to create a multiplier effect that can accelerate progress across multiple pressing global health issues simultaneously, particularly in LMICs where the need is often greatest and the existing infrastructure is less developed.

Future directions and other ecosystem needs we are considering

We have various ideas for future initiatives, but we will prioritize and refine them based on our ongoing ecosystem assessment, and our capacity. Some projects we are currently exploring include:

A more targeted policy advocacy fellowship program for young professionals from low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), offering paid placements at high-impact health policy organizations. This program will aim to:
- Develop local policy talent through providing tailored training, mentorship and hands-on work experience
- Assist organizations in forming local connections and navigating complex political contexts in their target countries.
Scaling our health policy advocacy pilot program, depending on its success. This program will have a similar setup to Oxford Biosecurity Group, but with a brief educational component (seminars and lectures). We are also exploring the value and cost of supporting other groups (EA Groups, health societies, NGOs) in running similar training programs, should our pilot prove successful.
Creating a Global Health Project Database to efficiently connect organizations with skilled volunteers and potentially paid contractors, improving scalable use of talent to support high-impact work in global health policy.
Creating a list of local points of contact, by establishing a curated directory of vetted policy professionals in priority countries, to support global health policy organizations seeking local connections. This directory would include individuals with experience in policy work, and established networks with important stakeholders. Organizations could leverage this resource for both short-term consultations and long-term recruitment needs.

Build-in-Public

“Build-in-public” means sharing the process of developing our initiative openly, rather than working behind closed doors. We’ll be documenting our journey, sharing our learnings, and being transparent about our challenges and decision-making processes.

By building-in-public, we aim to build momentum around our initiative by connecting with more experts and organizations in the field, while also documenting our learnings to help others replicate and scale similar efforts.

Through our LinkedIn and newsletter, we’ll provide regular updates, insights, and resources that we hope will be valuable for students, professionals, and organizations in the global health space. You may register to our email list to receive a notification when we start our build-in-public process.

Who are we?

Global Policy Research Group (GPRG) is a policy think tank based in Sweden. The GPRG has a track record of collaborating with government agencies, policy institutions and universities in the LMICs. We are also running the EU Academy, a biannual, immersive program based in Lund, Sweden, dedicated to sparking interest in the EU and EU Careers amongst youth in Sweden. We also recently co-organized Sweden’s annual flagship EU conference, EU Days Lund 2024. Currently, we’re partnering with the Alliance to Reduce Antimicrobial Resistance (ARMoR) for their projects in Sweden and Nordic countries.

You can view our team members and advisors from here.

^
We should note that these observations are preliminary and require further validation through more research.
^
Organizations working in various countries, working on different problems and of varying sizes, have reported this issue, however we are still unsure of the extent to which this issue hinders progress. Understanding the extent -specifically within which countries and for which roles organizations face this issue- and significance of this problem is one of the main reasons we will conduct a comprehensive ecosystem assessment, and we are open to pivoting if we think this a less important problem than we initially inferred.
^
Although there are various organizations, such as Ambitious Impact and Vital Strategies, running excellent programs that also cover health policy advocacy our approach will differ in key ways outlined in our FAQ.