Putting it into Practice: Building Local Capacity to Improve Maternal Health
It has been a month since I arrived in Argentina. I am based in Pilar, a town at the northern border of the municipal boundaries of Argentina’s capital city, Buenos Aires and the Province of Buenos Aires. For the next nine months, I have been matched with Ashoka Fellow Alberto Vázquez who founded an...
Knowledge Academies
Knowledge Academies is a network of public schools for families, committed to leading a robust network of community partners in support of personalized learning. Their design places a heavy emphasis on academic, social emotional, college access, fitness, and wellness programming. Students and...
The Shifting Role of Patients in Today’s Healthcare System: Introducing Changemaker Health
The health sector is undergoing an evolution in the role of the patient. Actors across the sector face a competitive necessity and market demand to create more open and participatory pathways for patients and customers to get involved in their own healthcare. The shift toward patient empowerment can...
Patient Knows Best
Changemaker Health Series - Case Study No. 1 Put patients in control of their healthcare through patient-owned and patient-managed data MOHAMMAD AL-UBAYDLI Patients Know Best UK | http://www.patientsknowbest.com/ WHAT IF every patient could have seamlessly coordinated care and guide their own path...
10 System-Changing Ideas for Health from the Newest Class of Ashoka Fellows
As the summer season draws to a close, we can still enjoy fresh fruits and vegetables and spend lots of time outside. We may be more conscious of health during summer, when the living is easy; but for many champions in the newest class of Ashoka Fellows, health is a year-round preoccupation. Here...
Ashoka Fellow Catalina Escobar, this week's CNN Hero, is a lifeline for teen mothers in Colombia
Long-time advocate for the health of young girls and women Catalina Escobar was recently recognized as a CNN Hero. Escobar works as a "community crusader" in Cartagena, one of Colombia's largest cities where one-third of residents live at or below the poverty line, and, to complicate matters even...
Nourishing Schools in India
Ashoka and Swiss Re Foundation are partnering with schools to enable children to improve their own nutrition and that of their communities in India. In 2011 Ashoka and the Swiss Re Foundation started their journey on exploring how to improve the health status in India. An intense explorative phase...
Bringing Medicine to the Masses of Africa (when they are swimming in it?)
In many parts of the developed world, the practice of medicine by relying on such tools as herbs, meditation, trance, acupuncture, ionised water etc. is tolerated under the rubric of “complementary medicine”. In the United Kingdom, for instance, many public hospitals, such as the famed St. Mary’s in...
Avoiding Averages
“Teenage pregnancy is one of the biggest problems we face here,” says Maria, a nurse that has worked for over 20 years in a small health centre in a poor neighborhood about 2 hours north of Buenos Aires. “Most teenage pregnancies aren’t planned or wanted, so we spend a lot of time working with them...