Harvard University – Equity Initiative Global Learning (Boston)

Our 2021 Equity Initiative cohort completed our fellowship year with the first of two weeks starting in Harvard University in Boston. Sessions focused on some of the incentives and constraints that shape the path to health equity. Lincoln Chen, CMB president emeritus, led a discussion on advancing health equity in Asia, and Winnie Yip, professor of global health policy and economics at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, contrasted the roles of government and markets in the financing and delivery of health care. Illustrative examples were provided by William Hsiao, K.T. Li Professor of Health Economics at the Harvard Global Health Institute, who highlighted the challenges that Taiwan faced in developing a technically sound national health insurance plan that would fit into the political space, and Marty Chen, one of the founders of WIEGO (Women in Informal Employment Globalizing and Organizing), spoke about ways to extend access to health care to informal workers. Lawrence Susskind of MIT and the Consensus Building Institute led a training session on negotiation techniques, and Marshall Ganz of the Harvard Kennedy School showed Fellows how to use the power of public narrative to build broad-based support for their initiatives.