Millions Saved

"What I participated in this working group. We got hundreds of examples of potential success stories, and chose those that were based on the most rigorous data and that succeeded at scale. These aren’t about saving two lives in one village somewhere, although that is important to do. These stories are about transforming the health of entire countries and reaching hundreds of thousands over time. All these projects also built institutional capacity that was sustained after the donors went away. This book demonstrates that smart, well-constructed investments in global health can achieve widespread impact on the way people live. Some of the big successes they discuss include iron and iodine fortification, which improved the overall level of human health and nutrition. And in the field of family planning, by reducing the population growth rate, development programmes created the underlying basis for economic growth. These are very important examples and the book also defines some of the characteristics that are common across them. For instance, the success of most of these projects was attributable to working in partnership with local and regional partners. The book also highlights the need to have really strong evaluation and data collection, because often when you launch these programmes they don’t work right away – we need information to understand how they’re performing, and adapt. In our Feed the Future programme, we have taken all of the best practices of this report and put that into how we design food security programmes around the world. We build partnerships with local institutions, do rigorous reporting and evaluation, choose projects that are scalable and design projects that can be sustained after our money ebbs away."