Invest in health
The Executive Director of INDEPTH Network, Prof Osman Sankoh, has called for a stronger international commitment to investing in research, development and innovation in low and middle-income countries (LMICs). This, he said, was needed in many areas, but urgent in the field of health because it was cost-effective and saved lives.
Prof Sankoh made the call when he made a presentation in Geneva on the sidelines of the World Health Assembly meeting held on the theme: “The Role of R&D and Innovation for Development in LMICs” – the case of INDEPTH and similar organisations based in the Global South.
The side event was organised by the Council on Health Research for Development (COHRED), the Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative (DNDi), the Global Health Technologies Coalition (GHTC), the Global Health Council (GHC) and the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI).
“Research into health threats not only saves lives – it also helps governments and donors to save money, by identifying threats early and thereby avoiding the need for costly clean-up operations once it is too late to prevent the threat from spreading, and secondly by establishing which interventions work and which are cost-effective, ” Prof Sankoh said.
Data to guide policy makers
He said there was a huge data gap in the Global South, the southern half of the world, and the lack of reliable data made it very difficult for policy makers in low and middle-income countries to meet the real needs of their people.
He noted that policy makers who were guided by robust evidence were in a better position to design more effective health programmes and other social programmes by not only saving money but also improving their countries’ prospects of reaching the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).
He added that the post-MDG process should be a new opportunity for global health to really become global; not something done by the north to be transplanted to the south.
Giving examples of how health data have guided policy makers with huge benefits for society, Prof Sankoh said the INDEPTH Network and other research organisations in the Global South addressed the lack of reliable population-based data on health across many LMICs.
“We are attempting to break the link between material and data poverty. Epidemiology in many low and middle-income countries suffers from a dual lack of reliable population data and human capacity to make use of them. The immediate consequence is that health policy-making often lacks its essential evidence base, resulting in a failure to use scarce resources effectively in some of the world’s poorest countries,” he noted.
Research and MDGs
On how research data can help reach the MDGs, taking into consideration the framework for the post-2015 goals, Prof Sankoh focused on two of the proposed goals to show how important the data generated by INDEPTH member centres and other research centres were to the realisation of global development targets.
Referring to the goal of “Ensuring Healthy Lives,” he said INDEPTH member centres and its partners had already researched all of these areas, assessing the extent of the problems and proposing and testing interventions to tackle them.
For instance, he said INDEPTH’s research was instrumental in tracking the early spread of HIV/ AIDS in low and middle-income countries and in identifying who was most at risk and why.
On the second potential post-2015 goal, he spoke about “ensuring food security and good nutrition.”
He said INDEPTH members had expanded the global nutrition knowledge base, producing over 150 published papers in the past decade with some surprising and instructive findings.
“We have shown how undernutrition still plagues children and adults of all ages in low and middle-income countries, and they have demonstrated how malnutrition early in life continues to have effects on physical and mental development throughout the life cycle,” he said.
