Global Health Works: A new chapter for partnership working in Global Health
AN ONLINE MARKETPLACE TO MATCH PROBLEM SOLVERS ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD TO GLOBAL PUBLIC HEALTH TASKS, AND HELP DEMOCRATIZE AND DECOLONISE GLOBAL HEALTH
In developing countries, there is a historic, persistent, and significant lack of skilled people to work on public health problems. Across the global public health sector, non-voluntary work opportunities are monopolized by a shrinking pool of legacy development agencies. These entities absorb global public health work and fail to accommodate millions of qualified, capable people from working with healthcare institutes in developing countries. These bottlenecks extend beyond traditional employment and cross over into traditional volunteering opportunities. Voluntary work (from overseas or within the country) to plug the gaps in work comes with high costs and significant barriers to entry. Our digital marketplace idea can break down all those barriers.
These legacy global health development agencies are predominantly based in high-income countries, whereas the bulk of the intervention programmes are implemented in developing economies. As well as inefficiencies in using a wider pool of people’s skills and talents, this also results in a global health ecosystem of exclusionary colonialist patterns that center Euro-Western knowledge systems, which then shape the language and response to global public health problems — which, in turn, can have adverse health outcomes. Our digital marketplace will improve the distribution of global health work opportunities to people in the global north.
The focus on in-person engagements in global health is becoming dated as COVID-19 has shattered the fear of engaging remote talent and talented individuals know they can apply their knowledge from anywhere. Healthcare institutes and enterprises in developing economies are not yet taking advantage of the shift to online working. Global Health Works is a digital micro-jobs marketplace that will bring tectonic change to the way global public health development works. It will become the primary interface of remote work and problem-solving for non-clinical healthcare problems. Our digital marketplace will facilitate health institutions and enterprises to join the remote work revolution.
What is clever, innovative, or new about this approach?
- Engages people around the world in collaboration that leverages the expertise and networks of a wider pool of people
- Activate the technical volunteer capacity of women in addressing global health security challenges who are often underrepresented in volunteer deployments and exchanges. Increased deployment of women to the field of global health
- Low-risk access to pro-bono talent and build relationships with emerging healthcare leaders and problem-solvers.
- Outsourcing is not a new concept. Businesses in many sectors have relied on other organizations to perform non-core functions to support their activities for many decades. Thanks to freelance marketplaces like Freelancer.com, peopleperhour.com and fiverr.com, remote task working is now more accessible than ever. What is clever and new about this approach is applying an existing technology (freelance marketplaces) to a new market (global public health work) to democratizes access to work opportunities for people working in global health.
- Gives a much wider pool of people access to flexible work from healthcare institutes and enterprises in developing economies. Uncovers hidden talent and services in global health. Enable diverse talent to surface their certifications and experiences to help legacy Euro-Western development agencies build more inclusive teams.
- Allows a wider pool of talent from developing economies to establish credibility and relationships with a roster of stakeholders in health (not just healthcare institutes and enterprises). We can change lives in the developing world by providing opportunity and income.
- Health workers around the world – our solution providers – will have real-time visibility into opportunities that are in high demand, so that they can invest their time and focus on developing sought-after skills.
- We will help reduce carbon emissions by limiting the physical office footprint through our remote-first working model and reducing unnecessary commuting and travel.
- Allow health workers around the world to create productized, fixed-price ‘work offerings’ and let clients (healthcare institutes and enterprises) search, browse, and buy with just a few clicks.
- We can use machine learning capabilities to predict future behaviour based on historical use cases, and we will be able to leverage this data analysis to create stronger user experiences and establish success indicators of talent. Our data structure will accommodate an expanding set of categories of global health work, which when combined with our closed-loop data for the entire life cycle of work, and with Machine Learning predictive capabilities algorithms, can enable us to address the global health market even more accurately by linking the right person to the right task.
- Large market opportunity with non-existent/low online penetration. Millions of healthcare workers with underutilized capacity.
- Enables healthcare enterprises of any size to scale up or down based on demand and economic conditions
- Potential for enterprise solutions with legacy Euro-Western development agencies, to break down their internal silos and match people to opportunities anywhere within their organization. Help employees find roles suited to their experiences, and aspirations within global health—all within their agency.
- Applying an innovative e-commerce style approach to talent procurement in global public health will create efficiency and transparency.
- Builds on my experience and understanding of remotely capturing tasks and problems from healthcare institutes and enterprises as I have done for a number of years with the African Healthcare Hackathon. The African Healthcare Hackathon solves the real-life problems of African healthcare organizations by bringing together people that can contribute their skills to global health. The competition takes place over a weekend bringing together diverse groups of smart, interesting and passionate people across the UK, and virtually from Africa (The African Healthcare Challenge | AHHACK).
A little bit about me and my work…
I am someone that likes working with others to speak truth to power and improve health for as many people as possible…
Speaking on Sky News about inclusion
