David de Ferranti: Innovative Health Financing Entrepreneur
Don’t even bother trying to stump him. After over 25 years in the global health business, David de Ferranti has seen it all.
WPBA members got a rare insider’s peak into not only the world of the underprivileged many of the world but the few economists and diplomats who debate and try to lift their fates from within powerful global institutions. De Ferranti knows both worlds very well. A sustained career of devotion to health issues at the World Bank eventually culminated as Vice President, but it is his trips outside the World Bank that mean the most to him. In fact, they are why he charges into work every morning with the same energy as he did over 25 years ago.
Today, de Ferranti works at Washington’s premier think tank, the Brookings Institution, where he was not satisfied just to write research and work within the few vehicles for restrained change that DC devotes to the livelihood of the rest of the world. So he started the Global Health Financing Initiative.
Most development organizations are struggling to get enough attention on poverty in the third world while citizens in the first world are fighting a steep recession. Not GHFI.
With de Ferranti’s boundless energy, his brainchild is racing ahead at full speed. “I haven’t had a chance to catch my breath since we got started,” he explains. “Everyone wants to get involved. Everyone wants me to tell them how we can correct this sad imbalance in our civilization. I don’t have all the answers. In fact, I may have more questions than they do, but all my experience usually points me in the right direction, and I just have to get enough people moving in that direction to make a difference.”
De Ferranti has already made quite a difference, and WPBA’s members quickly learned why. In an all-too-short hour, he engaged the room in a dynamic discussion touching dozens of aspects of global health and solutions great and small—but none too trivial. In a room of students filled with passion to right wrongs and help others, de Ferranti could hardly asked for more from his visit, and he returned the gift in kind. Policy Cup competitors walked away with a nuanced understanding of the difficulties that face development experts every day, as well as just enough ideas to give them something that de Ferranti has been clinging to for his 25-plus years in this business: Hope.
Related posts:
- “How to Write a Persuasive Policy Proposal” with David de Ferranti
- Ranting with Reason, By David Vinnikov
- WHAT ASPECT OF HEALTH CARE DELIVERY IS MOST IN NEED OF REFORM? By Arnold Rosoff, Professor of Health Care Management and Legal Studies
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