Mariam Claeson, M.D., M.P.H., is the former director of the Global Financing Facility (GFF) for Every Woman Every Child at the World Bank. Prior to the GFF, she served as director for the Maternal Newborn and Child Health team at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Ms. Claeson was the program coordinator for the multisector response to AIDS in the South Asia Region of the World Bank and task team leader for HIV operations in India and Afghanistan from 2005-2012. And from 1998-2004, she served as the lead public health specialist in the Health, Nutrition and Population, Human Development Network of the World Bank. In this role she contributed to health reform programs in Egypt, Jordan, Nigeria, Uzbekistan, China, the Philippines and other countries, including the development and implementation of innovative financing instruments, such as a new lending instrument for multi country malaria operations, a regional rapid results agenda and buy downs for global public goods.
Ms. Claeson has also worked for the World Health Organization’s Global Program for the Control of Diarrheal Diseases, and as a physician in clinical practice at the rural district level in Tanzania, Bangladesh and Bhutan, and in national immunization and diarrheal disease control in Ethiopia.
As member of the Bellagio study group on child survival, Ms. Claeson participated in the call for action on child survival and co-authored: Knowledge into action for child survival in 2003. She now serves as a member of the WHO-UNICEF-Lancet Commission on A Future for the World’s Children. She co-authored the World Bank report The Millennium Development Goals for Health: Rising to the Challenges and the Disease Control Priorities in Developing Countries, second Edition.
She is currently an active member of the technical review panel of the Global Fund, the MNCH Strategic and Technical Advisory Group of WHO, and the White Ribbon Alliance Board of Directors.
