Before joining R4D, Ms. Brander supported sexual and reproductive health research at Population Council in Zambia through a fellowship with the Global Health Corp, a global health leadership accelerator program. In this role, she spearheaded development of a study documenting the impact of climate change on sexual and reproductive health and rights in rural Zambia. She has also worked domestically on women’s health with the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the National Women’s Health Network in Washington, DC.

In 2018, Ms. Brander won a competitive Young Leader scholarship funded by the Gates Institute to participate in the International Conference on Family Planning in Rwanda. She has presented her research in local and international conferences including the AIDS 2020 and Interest 2020. She has contributed to several peer-reviewed publications.

Ms. Brander holds a master’s degree in reproductive and sexual health research from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and a BA in anthropology concentrating on global health and the environment with a minor in biology from Washington University in St. Louis.

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Increasing investment to meet World Health Assembly targets for malnutrition could yield US$83 billion in additional GDP growth in 15 African countries, according to new analysis released by the Global Panel on Agricultural and Food Systems for Nutrition at the African Development Bank’s Annual Meetings in Lusaka, Zambia.

Today’s session on achieving nutritional security also provided the backdrop for the release of an Africa-specific investment framework developed by the World Bank and Results for Development. The framework suggests that the human and economic benefits of achieving these targets as they relate to stunting, wasting, anaemia, and breastfeeding, could be unlocked by increasing investment by just US$2.7 billion annually over the ten-year period leading up to 2025.

“Poor nutrition has cast a long shadow over entire generations, denying children, communities, and nations from reaching their full potential,” said Kofi Annan, former United Nations Secretary-General and Chair of the Kofi Annan Foundation. “One of the most critical steps we can collectively take to achieve nutrition security is to transform the continent’s agricultural sector. If African agriculture is to be truly transformed, investments must flow through the smallholder farmers, particularly women farmers and their families.”

To read the full article, click here.

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As a senior program officer with R4D’s market shaping practice, she leads the global components of the practice’s flagship project to increase access to childhood pneumonia treatments in high burden countries. Ms. Ahn oversees analyses in several countries in Africa and Asia to identify market barriers and targeted areas for support to scale access to amoxicillin dispersible tablets (amox DT) – the WHO-recommended treatment of childhood pneumonia. Her work involves extensive engagement with reproductive, maternal, newborn and child health advocates, policymakers and donors to prioritize  childhood pneumonia and support resource mobilization efforts for child health commodities; additionally, she works closely with global and local suppliers of amox DT to increase transparency of markets in high burden countries, and to share the business-case for country-level drug registration, to ensure a readily accessible supply of the life treatment.

Before working at R4D, Ms. Ahn spent several years in Zambia supporting the development of standard operating procedures for the national implementation of Option B+, an antiretroviral treatment for HIV-positive pregnant or breastfeeding mothers, and subsequently managing an evaluation of Zambia’s national immunization program for Gavi. She also worked at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, where she developed and applied analytical methods to estimate the global burden of disease, specifically diarrheal diseases in children under five, for the Global Burden of Diseases Study. Ms. Ahn was a Fulbright Fellow in South Korea where she worked on the country’s first incidence and prevalence study of autism.

Ms. Ahn holds an MPH in health metrics and evaluation from the University of Washington and a BA in international political economy from the University of California, Berkeley. She speaks English, Spanish and Korean.

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The report sets a baseline understanding of healthcare supply chains and characterizes the current private sector role in supply chains in lower middle income countries. It is informed by in-depth case studies of Ghana and Zambia, as well as interviews of over 40 supply chain and health experts in 12 countries about private sector initiatives in those countries. The major findings characterize supply chains, analyze the potential to invest in private sector initiatives, and make recommendations for key stakeholders.

Strong supply chains are essential to effective health care delivery in all sectors—public, faith-based, employer-provided, and private. In the countries of the Organisation for Cooperation and Development (OECD), supply chains rely heavily on the private sector for supply, distribution, and provision of key auxiliary services even when the health system itself is largely or exclusively public sector. These supply chains work quite well in ensuring consistent availability of high-quality product. In contrast, health supply chains in many low- and middle-income countries perform poorly and have less private sector involvement. This observation leads us to ask: How might a greater role for the private sector, greater leveraging of private sector supply chain best practices, or a combination of the two improve health supply chains in low- and middle-income countries?

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