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On strengthening digital health systems, disease surveillance, emergency preparedness and response, M&E, and what working inside these systems actually teaches you.
Featured Series
Nine essays on what nine years inside WHO Nigeria and Nigeria's health systems actually teach you: on data, coordination, community, and what persists when the funding ends.
A career in global health M&E is one of the most intellectually demanding and practically consequential roles in international development. It sits at the intersection of epidemiology, programme design, data systems, and strategic management and it directly determines whether health programmes produce the outcomes they are designed for.
Monitoring and evaluation has a language problem. The same term means different things in different frameworks. This glossary establishes working definitions for the terms used throughout this blog series and across the WHO programmes I support so that every article builds on a shared foundation.
After over nine years spanning polio eradication, disease surveillance, immunisation, and health systems strengthening across Nigeria, here is an honest account of what the work has taught me.
Lesson 8 of 9: In public health, the technical solutions are rarely the bottleneck. What slows us down is the human and institutional challenge of getting multiple organisations to move in the same direction at the same time.
Lesson 5 of 9: One of the most damaging assumptions in global health is that communities are blank slates waiting to receive interventions. They are not. They have knowledge, priorities, and agency that any effective programme must engage with.
Lesson 4 of 9: Field practitioners often see policy as bureaucratic obstruction. After working at the intersection of policy and implementation for over nine years, I have come to see it differently.
Lesson 3 of 9: Health policies designed at the national level are only as effective as their implementation at the community level. The "last mile" is not a delivery problem. It is a design problem.
Lesson 1 of 9: Over nine years into a public health career, the lesson I return to most often is the one that took the longest to truly understand: passion is not a strategy.
How digital M&E tools are compressing the feedback loop between health programme implementation and strategic decisions, and what it takes to get the transition right.
More articles in progress. Topics include community health systems, eHealth implementation, and lessons from outbreak response.
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