What Disruptions in Health Systems Reveal About Power, Trust, and Leadership
Hosts: Global Health Corps, Partners In Health, and Last Mile Health
Increasingly, governments in Sub-Saharan Africa are being asked to take on greater ownership of health systems, often on accelerated timelines and amidst deep uncertainty.
This session explores what it takes to work effectively with governments to strengthen health systems. Drawing on experience from Ebola, COVID-19, cholera outbreaks, climate-driven shocks, and the restructuring of global health financing toward bilateral, country-led models, leaders from Partners In Health, Last Mile Health, and Global Health Corps will examine how capacity-building efforts succeed or fail under pressure.
Speakers will explore how leadership operates as connective tissue: shaping how community health workers are supervised and supported, how district and hospital managers make tradeoffs, how ministries absorb new responsibilities, and how technical systems adapt when external partners step back.
Together, speakers will examine: What meaningful government partnership looks like beyond parallel systems How to build frontline, managerial, and technical capacity that governments can sustain Where NGOs add the most value in moments of transition and system integration Why leadership development is essential to translating capacity investments into resilient, equitable public systems.
The session invites funders, policymakers, and implementers to rethink how we support government-led health systems, and why investing in people, alongside institutions and infrastructure, is critical to lasting impact.
Speakers include:
As Last Mile Health’s Deputy Chief Program Officer, Mallika Raghavan helps lead the organization’s efforts to build exemplary community health programs.
Dr. Joel M. Mubiligi is Partners In Health’s Chief Innovation and Growth Planning Officer in charge of setting a strategic organizational vision for growth across all 11 PIH sites and the University of Global Health Equity (UGHE) in Rwanda.
Global Health Corps alumna Funny Kamanga is a community health leader who is currently a Commonwealth Scholar at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine who began her career as a community health worker in Malawi, advancing digital health systems at Partners In Health to strengthen frontline decision making and improve community health outcomes.
As the CEO of Global Health Corps, Heather Anderson she leads a global team committed to developing the next generation of health equity leaders across the U.S. and Sub-Saharan Africa.
This venue has a capacity of 60.