Last week, public health professionals, students, and government workers from across the country and abroad filled the George Washington University’s Marvin Center’s third floor to attend USAID’s 10th Annual Global Health Mini-University. The day-long program offered over 80 sessions and poster presentations on topics spanning technology, workforce issues, funding, and diseases.
Innovation
In an afternoon session, Maurice Middleberg proposed a strategy for the Obama Administration’s Global Health Initiative (GHI) to consider for addressing the current worldwide health worker shortage. “The US should create HRH [human resources for health] strategies that are responsive to national HRH strategies, with country ownership,” said Middleberg. Furthermore, the strategy must also address health workers’ needs. In addition to training and deploying new health workers, the GHI strategy must include retention. “Nobody stops to ask the health worker why she or he is leaving. It turns out that health workers are real human beings with complex needs,” he said. Read more »
President Obama’s 
Opportunities to spend time with monitoring and evaluation (M&E) colleagues from other organizations are infrequent, yet they provide a valuable way to share knowledge and ideas. Recently, I attended a meeting of the USAID Bureau of Global Health Cooperating Agencies’ M&E Working Group. The meeting convened two USAID deputy assistant administrators, senior leadership from several Bureau of Global Health offices, and dozens of M&E staff from USAID-funded projects.
The global health workforce crisis demands a strategic investment in a long-term solution. Given the limited human resources for health (HRH) available in many countries, an integrated, systems-based approach is necessary if countries are to achieve all the health-related 
