What’s New for Seed Global Health in 2024

Our CEO Dr. Vanessa Kerry reflects on the accomplishments of 2023 – and the way forward for 2024.

Seed Global Health had a productive and successful 2023. Working hand-in-hand with our global and national partners, we:

🌍 Continued to invest in educating and training the health workforce in four partner countries: Malawi, Sierra Leone, Uganda, and Zambia. Together with our partners, we have now trained more than 47,000 doctors, nurses, and midwives who serve catchment areas of more than 76 million people.

🌍 Raised awareness about and mobilized funding to address the dire effects of climate change on human health and wellbeing in coalition with influential international organizations, NGOs, think tanks, governments, philanthropic partners, and more.

🌍 Together, we supported the first-ever Declaration on Climate Change and Health at COP28, signed by almost 150 countries, and we mobilized critical financing and commitments for adaptation and resilience. 

Yet we all recognize there is so much more to do. The climate crisis is a health crisis and our progress must be measured in lives saved.

In moments of crisis, we can become paralyzed by the sheer size or complexity of what we face, or we can look for opportunities to act. We choose the latter. 

We must start by rapidly increasing and scaling our investments in national health systems led by skilled health workers. This “one solution for many challenges” approach will improve countries’ abilities not only to withstand climate shocks, but also future pandemics, ongoing epidemics such as HIV and maternal mortality, and to achieve universal health coverage. It’s a win-win, cost effective approach that builds resilience and saves lives.

At Seed Global Health, in 2024 and beyond, we commit to continuing to be bold, ambitious, and uncompromising in our approach.

We will:

🌍 Advocate relentlessly at the global level to increase financing to strengthen health systems, with a laser-like focus on the global health workforce.  

🌍 Expand investments in the health workforce as an adaptation and resilience-building measure against climate change.

🌍 Make the return-on-investment case for investing in health systems and the global health workforce – to make sure health is understood as fundamental to our economic and national security.

🌍 Support our partner countries to assess their climate change risks – especially in the area of health – and develop costed climate response plans that they can use to secure the funding they need.

Health is fundamental. Having good health is our ability to go to work and school and to care for our loved ones and participate fully in society.

There is no such thing as too ambitious for this moment. It will drive our progressive and incremental change towards a healthier world. 

I invite you to join us as we take on this important work and continue to challenge the status quo in 2024. We need a chorus of voices – from all sectors and from all corners of the globe.