Victoria Fan

Victoria Fan is a research fellow at the Center for Global Development. Her research focuses on the design and evaluation of health policies and programs. Fan joined the Center after completing her doctorate at Harvard School of Public Health where she wrote her dissertation on health systems in India. Fan has worked at various nongovernmental organizations in Asia and different units at Harvard University and has served as a consultant for the World Bank and WHO. Fan is investigating health insurance for tertiary care in Andhra Pradesh, conditional cash transfers to improve maternal health, and the health workforce in India.

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What Indicators Reveal about Interest in Global Health: the World Health Statistics Report

May 21, 2012

This is a joint post with Alexander Rosinski at the University of California, San Francisco.

A few days ago the World Health Statistics 2012 Report released its annual compendium of statistics. No doubt, it was a lot of work to compile—to verify every number in every cell, for each country and indicator. The WHO should be commended for providing this invaluable global public good. A sincere request: the Report would be more user-friendly and useful if the Report came with spreadsheets in downloadable tables (much like the World Malaria Report), and if the Report’s tables were consistent with their main database, the Global Health Observatory (GHO). For example, the coverage measures of oral rehydration therapy (ORT) which were included in the Report are absent from the GHO, as far as we can tell. (On an unrelated note, we did notice that the GHO recently added hand-washing as an indicator, perhaps in response to a recent blog—kudos to WHO!)

The Report also offers a glimpse into what is of current interest and priority among donors and countries. Global health donors generally have pet priorities and interests. These are reflected in part by how many countries report for a given indicator. Read More…

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How Does HIV/AIDS Funding Affect a Country’s Health System?

May 10, 2012

By Victoria Fan in Evaluation, Monitoring, and Measurement, HIV/AIDS & Infectious Diseases Tags: HIV/AIDS, Services and Financing

This is a joint post with Amanda Glassman and Rachel Silverman.

Recently, the American Journal of Tropical Medicine & Hygiene published a paper by Shepard et al. evaluating the impact of HIV/AIDS funding on Rwanda’s health system. The headline of the press release was catchy and assertive: “Six-year Study in Rwanda Finds Influx of HIV/AIDS Funding Does Not Undermine Health Care Services for Other Diseases. Study Addresses Long-standing Debate about Funding Imbalances for Global Diseases.”
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Is The Global Fund Getting Better?

April 25, 2012

By Victoria Fan in Global Fund, Value for Money Tags: Global Fund, Value for Money

Amidst tough times, The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria is rapidly transforming for the better. After negative, if not slightly hysterical, press from cases of fraudulent spending (that the Global Fund itself discovered and reported in 2010), compounded by doubts among certain bilateral donors on the sustainability and efficiency of the Global Fund, the newly appointed temporary General Manager Gabriel Jaramillo and his team has moved forward to “transform” the Global Fund with considerable speed and deftness, restoring confidence among bilateral donors (such as Japan and several others) and country recipients as well as improving morale among the Fund’s staff. What are some of these fast-moving changes? And will these changes help the Fund to achieve better health outcomes?

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If the Global Health Donors Were Your Parents: A (Whimsical) Comparative Perspective

April 24, 2012

By Victoria Fan in Donor Community, Global Health Tags: Global Health, Value for Money

This is a joint post with Rachel Silverman.

Navigating the global health funding landscape can be confusing even for global health veterans; there are scores of donors and multilateral funding mechanisms, each with its own particular structure, personality, and philosophy. For the uninitiated, PEPFAR, GAVI, PMI, WHO, the Global Fund, UNITAID, and the Gates Foundation can all appear obscure and intimidating. But if your head is spinning from acronym-induced vertigo, fear not! We are here to help you make sense of it all. How, you ask? With a clear method for donor identification: comparing the donors to your parents.

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Waiting for AMFm’s Evaluation: What Will It Say on Supply-Side Subsidies?

April 18, 2012

By Victoria Fan in Global Fund, Malaria Tags: AMFm, Global Fund, Malaria

A few weeks ago, the Independent Evaluation of the Affordable Medicines Facility – malaria (AMFm) Phase 1 evaluation was released by the Global Fund on its website. Much to my dismay, however, this “evaluation” was only the ‘Baseline Report’ on AMFm which provides basic information on the pre-intervention data, based on my quick read of the Executive Summary:

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Global Sanitation Targets Risk Missing the Mark on Hygiene and Health Linkages

March 15, 2012

By Victoria Fan in Sanitation Tags: Sanitation

This is a joint post with Claire Chase, an Evaluation Specialist with the Water and Sanitation Program of the World Bank.

The recently released report by UNICEF and WHO on Progress on Drinking Water and Sanitation brought both good and bad news. The good news is that the world has ostensibly ‘reached’ part of the United Nations Millennium Development Goal (MDG) on drinking water: 88 percent of the world’s population now has access to an improved drinking water source. The bad news is that the world is still off track to meet the MDG target for sanitation. About 2.5 billion people still lack access to an ‘improved toilet’ and 1.1 billion of these practice open defecation. Sanitation matters greatly to the health of children and is an influential factor contributing to childhood diarrhea, the second leading cause of under-5 child mortality after pneumonia. Diarrhea claims more child deaths than HIV, malaria, and measles combined. Read More…

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Malaria Estimate Sausages by WHO and IHME

February 9, 2012

By Victoria Fan in Global Health Tags: Malaria

This is a joint post with Felix Lam.

Published last week in The Lancet, a new study by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) finds that there were 1.2 million deaths from malaria in 2010, not 655 thousand as estimated by the WHO. Following its release, headlines began splashing uncritically: “Malaria kills twice as many as previously thought, study finds” (The Guardian) “Malaria deaths hugely underestimated” (BBC). Which set of estimates is correct? Or at least which is less biased? Given the 1.2 billion dollars by donors to malaria in 2010, is it unreasonable to demand to know with more certainty, how many people are dying from malaria?
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