Amanda Glassman
Chief Operating Officer, Senior Fellow, and Board Secretary
Topics:
Governments and Development, Corruption, Transparency, and Governance, Gender and Equality, Latin America Initiative, Population and Development Research Agenda, Global Health Policy, Achieving More Health for the Money, Evaluating Health Programs, Millions Saved, Global Health Policy Research Network, Global Health Security, Antimicrobial Resistance, Infectious Diseases
Expertise
Health financing and payment, results-based financing, social protection, conditional cash transfer programs, noncommunicable disease, maternal and child health
Bio
Amanda Glassman is chief operating officer and senior fellow at the Center for Global Development and also serves as secretary of the board. Her research focuses on priority-setting, resource allocation and value for money in global health, as well as data for development. Prior to her current position, she served as director for global health policy at the Center from 2010 to 2016, and has more than 25 years of experience working on health and social protection policy and programs in Latin America and elsewhere in the developing world.
Prior to joining CGD, Glassman was principal technical lead for health at the Inter-American Development Bank, where she led policy dialogue with member countries, designed the results-based grant program Salud Mesoamerica 2015 and served as team leader for conditional cash transfer programs such as Mexico’s Oportunidades and Colombia’s Familias en Accion. From 2005-2007, Glassman was deputy director of the Global Health Financing Initiative at Brookings and carried out policy research on aid effectiveness and domestic financing issues in the health sector in low-income countries. Before joining the Brookings Institution, Glassman designed, supervised and evaluated health and social protection loans at the Inter-American Development Bank and worked as a Population Reference Bureau Fellow at the US Agency for International Development. Glassman holds a MSc from the Harvard School of Public Health and a BA from Brown University, has published on a wide range of health and social protection finance and policy topics, and is editor and coauthor of the books Millions Saved: New Cases of Proven Success in Global Health (Center for Global Development 2016), From Few to Many: A Decade of Health Insurance Expansion in Colombia (IDB and Brookings 2010), and The Health of Women in Latin America and the Caribbean (World Bank 2001).
Media Contact
Holly Shulman
hshulman@cgdev.org
Featured Work
In the News
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More From Amanda Glassman
July 24, 2018
Event
Every year, more than 5 million women, children and adolescents die from preventable conditions, due to a significant financing gap for healthcare for women, children and adolescents, and inadequate incentives for provision and use of quality health services, among other factors. The Global Financing Facility (GFF) in support of Every Woman Every Child is a new approach to sustainable global health financing that is supporting countries’ approaches to financing and investing in the health of their people.
May 4, 2018
Publication
The international family planning community has made impressive gains in increasing global access to high-quality, voluntary family planning services. However, significant challenges remain with maintaining current support and meeting the growing need projected for family planning services and commodities across low- and middle-income countries (LMICs).
May 15, 2018
Event
Each year, delegations representing all World Health Organization (WHO) Member States attend the World Health Assembly (WHA) to determine the policies and budget of the organization. In advance of this year's WHA, the Center for Global Development will convene a curtain-raiser event to highlight topics and controversies on the WHA agenda -- from universal health coverage (UHC) and its measurement to the role WHO might play vis-à-vis global partnerships and funders and the alignment of global priorities.
Pages
October 2, 2014
Event
Independent policy research organizations – or think tanks – play a potentially important role in translating evidence to action, lending both technical expertise and an objective evidence base to help strengthen policy behind people-centered health systems in the developing world. This panel will highlight successful and less successful efforts by think tanks around the world to bridge the gap between health systems research and policy impact, with emphasis on tried and tested strategies as well as “bloopers” that unite researchers, activists, practitioners and policy-makers and can be utilized in a variety of settings. Panelists will describe a specific experience and debate the issues related to driving a research agenda from concept to conclusion to policy impact, highlighting what worked – and what didn’t – along the way.
July 7, 2014
Publication
Despite improvements in censuses and household surveys, the building blocks of national statistical systems in sub-Saharan Africa remain weak. Measurement of fundamentals such as births and deaths, growth and poverty, taxes and trade, land and the environment, and sickness, schooling, and safety is shaky at best. The Data for African Development Working Group’s recommendations for reaping the benefits of a data revolution in Africa fall into three categories: (1) fund more and fund differently, (2) build institutions that can produce accurate, unbiased data, and (3) prioritize the core attributes of data building blocks.
June 11, 2012
Publication
Decisions about which type of patients receive what interventions, when, and at what cost often result from ad hoc, nontransparent processes driven more by inertia and interest groups than by science, ethics, and the public interest. Reallocating a portion of public and donor monies toward the most cost-effective health interventions would save more lives and promote health equity.
February 7, 2012
Publication
The authors apply Birdsall and Kharas’s Quality of Official Development Assistance (QuODA) methodology to rank donors across 23 indicators of aid effectiveness in health.
October 27, 2014
Blog Post
How much is actually being spent on Ebola by donor governments, organizations, and private individuals? The short answer is that we don’t really know.
June 14, 2016
Publication
Global health action has been remarkably successful at saving lives and preventing illness in many of the world’s poorest countries. This is a key reason that funding for global health initiatives has increased in the last twenty years. Nevertheless, financial support is periodically jeopardized when scandals erupt over allegations of corruption, sometimes halting health programs altogether.
July 8, 2014
Publication
Despite improvements in censuses and household surveys, the building blocks of national statistical systems in sub-Saharan Africa remain weak. Measurement of fundamental statistics such as births and deaths, growth and poverty, taxes and trade, land and the environment, and sickness, schooling, and safety is shaky at best.
Pages
July 14, 2016
Publication
Millions Saved (2016) is a new edition of detailed case studies on the attributable impact of global health programs at scale. As an input to the book, this paper provides an independent assessment of the cost-effectiveness of a selection of the cases using ex post information from impact evaluations, with the objective of illustrating how economic evaluation can be used in decision making and to provide further evidence on the extent of health gains produced for the funding provided.
September 9, 2015
Publication
Many health improving interventions in low-income countries are extremely good value for money. So why has it often proven difficult to obtain political backing for highly cost-effective interventions such as vaccinations, treatments against diarrhoeal disease in children, and preventive policies such as improved access to clean water, or policies curtailing tobacco consumption?
February 9, 2015
Publication
Since 2001, an aid consortium known as Gavi has accounted for over half of vaccination expenditure in the 75 eligible countries with an initial per capita GNI below $1,000.
October 16, 2014
Publication
As Latin American countries seek to expand the coverage and benefits provided by their health systems under a global drive for universal health coverage (UHC), decisions taken today – whether by government or individuals – will have an impact tomorrow on public spending requirements.
July 14, 2014
Publication
Across multiple African countries, discrepancies between administrative data and independent household surveys suggest official statistics systematically exaggerate development progress. We provide evidence for two distinct explanations of these discrepancies.
May 8, 2012
Publication
Amid debate about whether adolescent pregnancy is a problem in and of itself or merely symptomatic of deeper, ingrained disadvantage, this paper aggregates recent quantitative evidence on the socioeconomic consequences of and methods to reduce of teenage pregnancy in the developing world.
April 17, 2012
Publication
This paper examines opportunities for improved efficiency in malaria control, analyzing the effectiveness of interventions and current trends in spending. Overall, it appears that resources for malaria control are well spent—however, there remain areas for improved efficiency, including (i) improving procurement procedures for bed nets, (ii) developing efficient ways to replace bed nets as they wear out, (iii) reducing overlap of spraying and bed net programs, (iv) expanding the use of rapid diagnostics, and (v) scaling up intermittent presumptive treatment for pregnant women and infants.
February 9, 2012
Publication
Jacob Hughes, Amanda Glassman, and Walter Gwenigale discuss the design, opportunities, and limitations of the of Liberia Health Sector Pool Fund.
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