I am delighted that Gini Arnold, a Cambridge MBA alum from 2009, has agreed to be our guest blogger. Gini has an undergraduate degree from Cambridge in biological anthropology as well as an MBA, a background working for the UN and a passion for global health. She took the entrepreneurship electives on the MBA as well as some additional health-care courses. As part of the MBA, Gini’s global consulting project (GCP) was with Vodafone looking at the market and opportunities for a mobile phone company to address the growing problem of obesity in the world. After the MBA Gini returned to the World Health Organization in Geneva, where she built on her GCP experience to help develop a global WHO/ITU partnership to combat non-communicable diseases in the developing world. I personally feel that it is an important initiative which is why I have asked Gini to explain her project through this blog.
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Non-communicable diseases (NCDs) are the leading cause of death worldwide. They dominate health care needs and expenditure. NCDs like cancer, heart disease and stroke, lung disease and diabetes lead to more than 36 million deaths every year. More than nine million of all deaths attributed to NCDs were “premature deaths” occurring before the age of sixty. While NCDs are now common in all countries, low-income countries are particularly affected, nine out of ten premature deaths from NCDs occurred in low- and middle-income countries.
Recognizing that NCDs are a major challenge for development in the 21st century, the Political Declaration adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in September 2011 called on the World Health Organization ( WHO ) to lead and coordinate global action against NCDs. WHO and ITU, the UN health and information and communication technologies (ICTs) agencies, have come together in a ground-breaking new partnership to focus on the use of mobile technology to assist with the prevention and treatment of NCD’s. This partnership aims to contribute to global and national efforts to save lives, minimize illness and disability, and reduce the social and economic burden attributable to NCDs.
NCDs are largely preventable through tackling common risk factors: tobacco use, unhealthy diet, physical inactivity and the harmful use of alcohol. These risk factors lead to the four common NCDs: cardiovascular diseases, cancers, chronic respiratory diseases and diabetes. This new UN initiative will harness the best mobile technology available and make it accessible for all countries to fight NCDs. A number of countries are already using mobile technology to deliver health promotion messages on the NCD risk factors, to survey the epidemic, to persuade users to change unhealthy behaviours and to help countries implement national laws on NCDs.
Recent technological innovations are changing the healthcare and health-management context for NCDs. Mobile phones have already been successfully used in the communicable disease and maternal/child health fields to improve access to health services, to train health workers, to ensure treatment compliance, in monitoring and surveillance, and in the management of chronic diseases, etc. In the non-communicable disease field there is good evidence for disease management using mobile applications. A number of countries have also used mobile technology to deliver health promotion messages on the NCD risk factors, to survey the epidemic, to persuade users to change unhealthy behaviours and to help countries implement national laws on NCDs. This initiative will take these successful pilots to the world stage through a new global UN, private sector and government partnership focused on providing mobile solutions for NCDs.
This global initiative which was launched last week in Dubai will take these successful pilot-schemes and scale them up in other countries. WHO will provide the technical assistance and ITU will help implement country projects through government partnership, with the support of the private sector.
I was part of the joint WHO and ITU team behind the launch. I realized pretty early on in my career that a lot of problems in public health stem from managerial issues and I was keen to apply a general management MBA to public health. As part of the project initiation stage, I returned to Cambridge and spent time as a policy fellow meeting university departments and experts of interest to the initiative.
The initiative was launched at the World Telecoms Event in Dubai, in October 2012 and has elicited enormous interest from telecoms companies, technology companies pharmaceutical companies, governments and academics who hope to work together with the two UN agencies over the next four years.
The MBA has undoubtedly been instrumental in this new area of work for the UN. The contacts I made at the Judge and the courses, particularly in innovation and strategy have been really useful for this project. The MBA also gave me useful tools which I can easily apply to global health. I encourage others working in or thinking about careers in the UN and in global health to consider such programmes.
Gini Arnold Cambridge MBA 2009
