Global Health and Human Security
Program Overview
In the year leading up to the July 2008 Toyako G8 Summit, JCIE organized a high-level working group comprised of scholars, government officials, and practitioners from diverse sectors in Japan to explore new international approaches to global health challenges and the contributions that Japan can make in this area. This group has come to be called the “Takemi Working Group” due to the leadership of Keizo Takemi, a prominent Japanese politician and former senior vice minister of health, labor, and welfare, who joined JCIE as a senior fellow in September 2007. In July 2009, the working group’s membership expanded, and it was redesigned as the Global Health and Human Security program within JCIE, giving the activities more institutional structure and sustainability.
In the first phase of the program, in the lead up to the Toyako G8 Summit, the working group produced a set of recommendations for the Japanese government based on intense consultations with key experts around the world. The activities of the working group during this crucial period have been credited with helping keep global health issues high on the agenda of the summit host country, Japan.
The second phase of the program has followed up by identifying ways to turn the Toyako G8 Summit recommendations on health system strengthening into concrete action and, by doing so, to help ensure that political momentum was maintained during the transition to the 2009 G8 Summit in Italy. A high-profile conference was convened in November 2008 to explore the creation of a global strategic framework for strengthening health systems in developing countries around the world, and the program task force released a major report in January 2009 compiling policy recommendations for the G8 countries.
Phase II. Global Action for Health System Strengthening (August 2008–October 2009)
Following the Toyako G8 Summit, the working group was encouraged by the Japanese government to translate the 2008 G8 Summit recommendations into concrete proposals for ways in which the G8 member countries and stakeholders should be working to strengthen health systems in developing countries. A task force was set up to serve as a catalyst to synthesize existing initiatives for health system strengthening within the framework of human security. Three research teams were formed within the task force to look in-depth at the entry points for health system strengthening that were proposed at the G8 Summit—the health workforce, health information, and health financing. The research was designed to inform the task force’s exploration of the overall question of how to build integrated health systems that are able to (1) respond to the challenges of both providing primary health care and tackling individual diseases, (2) achieve the health-related Millennium Development Goals, and (3) enhance the human security of people around the world. A major international conference and a series of workshops and meetings were convened in Tokyo and elsewhere around the world, and the resulting discussions formed the basis for a final report that was submitted in January 2009 to the Japanese government, which in turn handed the report to the government of Italy, as the latter prepared to chair the 2009 G8 Summit. Many of the ideas in the report were, in fact, reflected in the G8 Leaders Declaration of the 2009 L'Aquila Summit. Excerpts from the program's research were also featured in a special section in The Lancet. This initiative was organized with generous support from the government of Japan, the World Health Organization, the World Bank, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and other stakeholders, although the views laid out in the report do not necessarily represent those of these supporters.
As a follow-up to the working group’s final report, Global Action for Health System Strengthening—Policy Recommendations to the G8, the task force of global health experts embarked on a multi-region dissemination seminar tour during the first half of 2009. The dissemination seminars were held on three continents—Asia, North America, and Africa—during the months leading up to the G8 Summit in Italy. In addition to the seminars, working group and task force members discussed the findings and recommendations in the report at meetings convened by other organizations in Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America.
Phase I. Challenges in Global Health and Japan's Contributions (September 2007–July 2008)
The project working group was formed in September 2007 to encourage collaboration among top experts and policymakers in Japan and around the world in the lead up to the July 2008 Toyako G8 Summit. The group compiled a report, “Global Health, Human Security, and Japan’s Contributions,” based on discussions with practitioners and other experts from international organizations, major policy research institutes, government agencies, implementing NGOs, and other institutions around the world. This was designed to help prioritize global health on the G8 Summit agenda, as well as in the May 2008 Fourth Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD IV). The report was submitted to a major international symposium, which was organized on May 23–24, 2008, by the Friends of the Global Fund, Japan (FGFJ), and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.