Giving Compass' Take:

• This Forbes Nonprofit Council post, written by the president and CEO of IntraHealth International, discusses how risk and trust are two major obstacles in achieving universal health coverage.

• NGOs and nonprofits can play a role in breaking through such barriers, especially when it comes to strategic collaborations. There is a path to scale if we're willing to make the leap.

• Here's more on why universal health coverage is a must.


Why haven’t we achieved health for all yet? Forty years ago, the global health community committed to achieving primary health care for all by 2000. But today, about half of the world’s population still does not have full access to essential health services.

Could public-private partnerships finally get us there? Last month at the Africa Health Business Symposium (AHBS) in Johannesburg, an annual event we helped sponsor, hundreds of health ministers, government officials, business representatives and health-sector stakeholders and investors from across Africa came together to discuss this.

But I left chewing on a different question: How do we move from small- and mid-scale pilot partnerships between the public and private sectors to big, collaborative impact on global health?

For the past 40 years, we’ve tried to reach our health goals mostly by advancing in our own sectors or trying out partnerships on a project-by-project basis. At IntraHealth International, we’ve worked with the Novartis Foundation and corporations in Dakar to combat hypertension. In Kenya, the Afya Elimu student loan mechanism is a great example of sustainable, cross-sector collaboration that is keeping health worker trainees in school.

But where are the efficient, productive, large-scale solutions to public health in Africa that public-private partnerships could offer? Two things are stopping us: risk and trust.

Read the full article about removing roadblocks to universal health coverage by Pape Gaye at Forbes.