Typically data on funding to global health and development innovations has been fragmented and difficult to find. Without data, we as a sector, lack transparency and miss lessons, trends, and insights at innovation and ecosystem levels. We wanted to understand how much funding has gone to maternal and newborn health innovations, and the stage of scale those innovations have achieved.
More specifically, we sought to answer the following questions:
- How much funding has been invested in maternal and newborn health innovation by key global health funders? What is the result of that funding?
- What are the characteristics of the innovations? Are the innovations more likely to utilize a specific technical approach (e.g. medical devices, pharmaceuticals, diagnostics)
- How many are having an impact at scale?
These questions are explored in a recent paper, Trends and Gaps in Funding and Scaling Maternal and Newborn Health Innovations, led by researcher Allison Ettinger and Equalize Health (formerly D-Rev) CEO, Krista Donaldson, and developed collaboratively with Global Innovation Exchange (GIE), the largest database of global development innovations managed by Results for Development (R4D). R4D’s Meghan Erkel supported the analysis and Sweta Govani is a key contributor to the paper.
Amongst other takeaways, the analysis uncovered that ~40% of the maternal and newborn health innovation funding has been in early stage innovations, particularly universities. At the time of the analysis in 2020, most of these early stage innovations had remained in earlier stages. These and other findings from the analysis raise important questions that could better inform the global health sector as well as innovation support and funding trends across development.
In addition to this knowledge product, we encourage you to read “Funding maternal and newborn health innovation: 5 ways to accelerate SDG progress” with recommendations based on this research in Alliance Magazine: For Philanthropy & Social Investment Worldwide.
Finally, the authors call upon development actors to continue to contribute data to and invest in databases that enable this type of analysis, transparency, and learning. Explore the GIE innovation database or contact the GIE team at admin@globalinnovationexchange.org to contribute to or access GIE data.
Authors
Main authors: Allison Ettenger and Krista Donaldson (Equalize Health)
Contributors: Sweta Govani and Meghan Erkel (R4D)
