In recent weeks, GE Reports has focused on stories about our healthymagination work with clinics in remote areas such as Bangladesh and Chad. And we’ve also turned the spotlight on corporate citizenship efforts with a number of essays written by external thought leaders about critical global issues –- and what kinds of roles companies like GE can, and should play in helping to address them. Today, Josh Ruxin, a public health and economic development expert based in Kigali, Rwanda, hits upon those same themes in his essay running in The Huffington Post, which describes how healthcare efforts in remote parts of the world can become exponentially more effective when donations move beyond simply equipment and dollars — and are instead infused with on-going training.


In for the long haul: Formerly called Africa Project, GE’s Developing Health Globally program began in 2004 with a $20-million product donation investment in rural African communities and has since expanded to a five-year, $30-million commitment. In 2007, the program expanded into Latin America with two hospital sites in Honduras. In 2008, GE announced the Honduras program’s growth from two to six hospitals.

Writes Josh: “Everyone talks a good deal about public-private partnerships, but truly effective partnerships are rare as hen’s teeth ‘You’re not here to donate, you’re here to teach,’ is what Rwanda’s President Kagame told one potential partner.”

Josh, who focuses on comprehensive approaches to fighting poverty with an emphasis on scaling up national health programs, says that while healthcare “bricks and mortar” investments and equipment donations are vital, “more importantly, we need management systems and people with leadership skills.” He says the most effective programs he’s seen in Rwanda are those that fully integrate equipment with training, and points to efforts in precisely that area by companies such as Pfizer, Ericson and GE as ones that fuse teaching into their programs.

Of Pfizer, Josh notes that while the pharmaceutical giant had been donating drugs to sub-Saharan African countries for years, in 2003 it “started donating an even more valuable asset: the time of their employees. More than five years later, Pfizer’s Global Health Fellows program has deployed close to 200 highly skilled employees around the world to improve health for underserved communities by building capacity to expand healthcare services,” he writes.

With GE, Josh points to the mulitmillion dollar commitment made in 2004 to improve healthcare delivery in Africa — and which later expanded to Latin America — via GE’s Developing Health Globally program. “Unsurprisingly, GE’s program includes the donation of equipment to hospitals and community health centers, but GE employees also serve as teachers and ‘volunteer ambassadors,’ he writes. “GE engineers are initially on-site at hospitals and health centers to install equipment and systems, and volunteers stay in touch remotely and via periodic visits, maintaining relationships with doctors and medical staff, and offering coaching and mentoring to health care professionals. They facilitate the monthly collection of metrics and make subsequent recommendations for training and other improvements. They even enlist the aid of GE experts not officially in the ambassador program when problems overlap into their areas of focus.

“According to Krista Bauer, Director of Global Programs for GE, ‘Management processes and accountability are critical,’ as is hospital leadership. ‘You can put a lot of infrastructure in place, but if you don’t have the leadership in place, it will all fall apart.’”

Josh continues: “The most up-to-date equipment and most skilled staff are only as good as the team managing them.” Too often, management training is just “an afterthought,” he says. “But the clever and experienced administration of limited resources can be exponentially more effective than the poor management of plenty.”

* Read Josh’s full essay
* Learn more about GE’s Developing Health Globally program
* Watch a video about our work in Honduras
* Watch a video about our work in Africa
* Watch Part 3 of our video series our work with IMC in Chad
* Watch Part 2 of our video series
* Watch Part 1 of our video series
* Read “Helping the docs at the nation’s largest free clinic”
* Learn about GE’s healthymagination strategy on cost, quality and access
* Read about GE’s work with clinics in India
* Read about GE’s donation of neonatal equipment in the U.K.
* Read GE Reports’ coverage of the healthymagination launch
* Read about GE’s Electronic Medical Records technology
* Read GE Reports’ story about our Health Advisory Board
* Read about healthymagination’s work with electronic medical records
* Read about our healthymagination work in Bangladesh
* Learn more about the partnership with Grameen Healthcare Trust
* Learn about our work in Cambodia
* Read our story about GE’s localized healthcare technology breakthroughs going global
* Read “GE systems boost cancer center case capacity by 900”
* Read “Hey, good looking! GE’s medical designs win 5 awards”
* Read an essay by Sean Ansett in Part 1 of our series: Citizen GE
* Read an essay by Mindy S. Lubber in Part 2 of our series: Citizen GE
* Read an essay by Ricardo Melèndez-Ortiz in Part 3 of our series
* Read GE’s Citizenship Report
* Read the announcement about the report being issued
* Read Marc Gunther’s blog about the report