At Results for Development, Ms. Tshewang is a senior program officer for the market shaping team based in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, where she works alongside local change agents to scale up access to childhood pneumonia treatment. She is also the focal point for R4D’s Tanzania Office.

Before joining R4D, Ms. Tshewang worked with various NGOs in low-resource communities in India, Nepal, Thailand, and Tanzania, designing and implementing inclusive health care programs aimed at improving quality of life and social inclusion for children living with multiple disabilities. Prior to this, she worked with the Royal University of Bhutan and the University of Westminster Psychology Department, helping them create resources for positive health-seeking behavior, and leading a cross-country research project on the impact of mass media on deviant eating attitudes among older adolescents in Bhutan and England. She has also assisted the Royal University of Bhutan with curriculum development for child psychology and counseling.

Ms. Tshewang holds a master’s degree in health psychology, with a specialization in child and adolescent health, from the University of Westminster, London, UK. She is a graduate member of the British Psychological Society. She is a native speaker of Dzongkha and is fluent in English, Nepali and Hindi.

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Dr. Claeson was the program coordinator for the multisector response to AIDS in the South Asia region at the World Bank and task team leader for HIV operations in India and Afghanistan from 2005 to 2012. From 1998 to 2004, she served as lead public health specialist in the Health, Nutrition and Population Human Development Network at the World Bank. In this role, she contributed to health reform programs in Egypt, Jordan, Nigeria, Uzbekistan, China and the Philippines, including the development of innovative financing instruments such as a new lending instrument for multicountry malaria operations, a regional rapid-results agenda and buy-downs for global public goods.

Dr. Claeson also worked as a medical officer for the World Health Organization’s Global Programme for Control of Diarrhoeal Diseases, both globally and in Ethiopia, where she focused on national immunization and diarrheal disease control. She also worked as a physician in rural district-level clinical practice in Tanzania, Bangladesh and Bhutan.

Dr. Claeson is a commissioner on the Lancet Commission on Adolescent Health and Wellbeing. As a member of the Bellagio Study Group on Child Survival, she participated in the call to action on child survival and co-authored Knowledge Into Action for Child Survival in 2003. She also served as a member of the WHO-UNICEF-Lancet Commission on A Future for the World’s Children and co-authored the World Bank reports The Millennium Development Goals for Health: Rising to the Challenges and Disease Control Priorities in Developing Countries, Second Edition. She was awarded an honorary doctor of medicine degree by the Karolinska Institutet in 2015.

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Over the 5-year period ending in 2018, 16 countries with a combined birth cohort of over 6 million infants requiring life-saving immunizations are scheduled to transition (graduate) from outside financial and technical support for a number of their essential vaccines. This support has been provided over the past decade by the GAVI Alliance. Will these 16 countries be able to continue to sustain these vaccination efforts?

To address this issue, GAVI and its partners are supporting transition planning, entailing country assessments of readiness to graduate and intensive dialogue with national officials to ensure a smooth transition process. This approach was piloted in Bhutan, Republic of Congo, Georgia, Moldova and Mongolia in 2012. The pilot showed that graduating countries are highly heterogeneous in their capacity to assume responsibility for their immunization programmes. Although all possess certain strengths, each country displayed weaknesses in some of the following areas: budgeting for vaccine purchase, national procurement practices, performance of national regulatory agencies, and technical capacity for vaccine planning and advocacy.

The 2012 pilot experience further demonstrated the value of transition planning processes and tools. As a result, GAVI has decided to continue with transition planning in 2013 and beyond. As the graduation process advances, GAVI and graduating countries should continue to contribute to global collective thinking about how developing countries can successfully end their dependence on donor aid and achieve self-sufficiency.

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Ms. Agyeman previously managed a £50 million corporate match fund program at Vinspired and worked with the Greater London Authority Mayor’s Office leading national youth volunteering and grant management programs. Past positions include working for TimeBank and Mind. She has worked on projects in African and Asian countries, including Ghana, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, South Africa, Nepal and Bhutan.

Ms. Agyeman has over 25 years of experience in the voluntary sector. She specializes in making spaces for innovators and entrepreneurs to develop the skills and knowledge to apply their ideas for social good. She believes in fostering effective public/private/voluntary sector collaborations to tackle societal challenges.

In addition to serving on the Results for Development UK Board, Ms. Agyeman is on the board of Architecture Sans Frontieres and Alma Mater Education, which provides sustainable, high-quality, geo-specific education in rural Ghana. She previously served on the board of Youth Music, serving disadvantaged youth, for five years. Ms. Agyeman also runs a micro-business, creating apparel, jewelry and furnishings with African textiles.

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