Leah Ewald is an associate program director at Results for Development (R4D) with ten years’ experience supporting organizations and policy makers to strengthen health systems and develop supportive global and regional ecosystems for country health system actors. Ms. Ewald currently leads the Financing Accelerator Network for NCDs (FAN) under the Access Accelerated-World Bank Technical Partnership. Her previous work spans across the fields of immunization, non-communicable diseases, private sector engagement, and health equity, and includes extensive experience implementing collaborative learning and qualitative research methods.
Since joining R4D in 2018, Ms. Ewald has managed immunization, COVID-19, and learning activities under USAID’s Health Systems Strengthening Accelerator, including overseeing immunization system strengthening activities in Guinea and Togo, managing qualitative assessments of nine countries’ efforts to integrate COVID-19 vaccination into their routine immunization systems, overseeing the design and launch of USAID’s Health Systems Strengthening Case Competition, and synthesizing project-wide learning around health equity, subnational stakeholder engagement, social and behavior change, and collaborative learning. Ms. Ewald managed technical workstreams around vaccine hesitancy, private sector engagement, decentralization, and human resource capacity development under the Gavi and Gates Foundation’s Learning Network for Countries in Transition (now Gavi’s Linked Immunisation Action Network). She also conducted qualitative research funded by the Gates Foundation on strategies and challenges for promoting the use of statistical models for health decision making and supported a consultative process to inform the Global Financing Facility’s private sector strategy. Under FAN, Leah is currently managing the launch of a network of regional NCD Financing Accelerators that provide countries with tailored, on-demand technical assistance, cross-country learning opportunities, and catalytic seed funding to promote NCD financing.
Before joining R4D, Ms. Ewald was an immunization program officer working on USAID’s Maternal and Child Survival Program at John Snow, Inc., where she supported a learning agenda around improving the generation, quality and use of routine immunization data in 11 countries, as well as backstopping the global immunization team and country teams in Kenya and Madagascar.
Ms. Ewald holds an MS in public health and an MA in international relations and economics from Johns Hopkins University, and a BA in anthropology from Washington University in St. Louis. She is a native English speaker and speaks Spanish and French.
