Esubalew Demissie is a health economist with more than 25 years of experience delivering social and economic change in Ethiopia through government, non-government and international organizations in the health, finance and education sectors.
At Results for Development, Mr. Demissie is a health economist and domestic resource mobilization specialist working on USAID’s Health Financing Improvement Program in Ethiopia, where R4D is a partner. His major responsibilities include providing strategic technical expertise in innovative domestic financing for health, carrying out fiscal space analysis and other forms of health financing technical analysis, facilitating health financing policy dialogue and advocacy fora between ministry of health and ministry of finance personnel and engaging in the identification, design and implementation of operational research related to domestic financing.
Throughout his career, Mr. Demissie has been instrumental in helping states develop, ratify and implement legal frameworks that support health financing reform to improve health coverage. As a health care finance specialist and then as a senior health care finance advisor to two previous USAID-funded health financing projects, ESHE II and HSFR respectively, he helped federal ministry of health and regional health bureaus to develop advocacy tools for increasing health budgets and also supported the development of Ethiopian hospital reform implementation guidelines. As a technical director in the FHE3 project, he co-wrote and conducted a situational analysis on primary health care delivery in hard-to-reach and pastoral areas of Ethiopia.
Mr. Demissie has presented papers at three international conferences: “Catastrophic Health Spending by People living with HIV/AIDS in Ethiopia,” presented at the 38th Annual International Conference on Global Health, Washington D.C, USA; “Retaining Qualified Health Staff: Do Private Wings Help? The Case of Ethiopia,” presented at the Second Global Symposium on Health Systems Research, Beijing, China; and “Success in Protection of the Poor in Ethiopia: Lessons from Fee Waiver Scheme Implementation in Amhara region,” presented at the 13th World Congress on Public Health, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
Mr. Demissie holds master’s degree in economics from Addis Ababa University, an MBA in health care services from Sikkim Manipal University of India and a BA in economics from Addis Ababa University. He is a native speaker of Amharic and speaks fluent English. He was co-awarded The Clark Abt Prize for outstanding social impact for improving access to high-quality care and driving gains in health through the Ethiopia Health Sector Financing Reform Project in 2013.
