Seed Global Health
Model & Strategy
Seed Global Health is a social enterprise envisioning a world in which a robust health workforce can provide quality, dignified health care for all. Seed has helped train over 60,000 cumulative healthcare professionals across seven African countries, who serve catchments of over 76 million people annually.
The Problem
In 2024, there remains an inequitable divide in the availability of comprehensive, quality health care in too many countries around the world. The World Health Organization estimates a shortfall of 10 million healthcare workers worldwide by 2030, causing an estimated additional annual cost of $500 billion to healthcare due to health worker inefficiency. In regions like sub-Saharan Africa, the gap between quality care and patient needs is even greater: the region manages 24% of the world’s disease burden, but has just 3% of its healthcare workers. And health workers’ jobs are only getting more difficult: the climate crisis has become a health crisis. Globally, health workers are confronting rapidly rising rates of infectious and noncommunicable diseases, pandemics, and climate-driven emergencies.
The Solution
Seed Global Health is a recognized leader in health workforce development, collaborating with the World Health Organization, the African Union and Africa Centres for Disease Control, and leading philanthropic partners to advance an ambitious global agenda for financing and strengthening health systems, especially as climate change increasingly threatens our collective health. For the past twelve years, Seed Global Health has provided high-quality technical assistance to national governments, academic institutions, and clinical institutions, training and supporting the professional health workforce — building a pipeline of well-trained physicians, nurses, and midwives — as a critical input to strengthening national health systems.
To date, Seed Global Health has trained more than 60,000 professional health workers and strengthened public health facilities serving more than 76 million people across Eswatini, Liberia, Malawi, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia. Through this body of work, Seed and their partners are making a demonstrable impact on patient outcomes. In 2024, Seed will launch their new strategic plan which will guide their work through 2030. This country-led plan will focus on deepening Seed’s impact, scaling what works to additional districts and regions in their partner countries of Malawi, Sierra Leone, Uganda, and Zambia with a focus on maternal and newborn health, community health, and emergency care.
Vanessa Kerry is a physician and the founder and the CEO of Seed Global Health. Having worked in resource-limited settings for over a decade, she has witnessed health inequities in many places in the world and has seen how shortages of indigenous providers in their home countries contributes to those inequities. She envisioned a solution where the growing number of U.S. health professionals interested in global health could serve as educators and faculty in these countries to build a pipeline of in-country providers.
Concurrent with her CEO role, Dr. Kerry is a physician at Massachusetts General Hospital and helps lead educational activities at the hospital’s Center for Global Health. Academically, she spearheads the program in Global Public Policy and Social Change in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Her work has included the grassroots effort which led to Seed Global Health, and policy initiatives in Rwanda, as well as looking at novel ways for U.S. foreign assistance to fund health efforts, which improve efficiency of aid delivery, develop capacity, and enhance national sovereignty. Prominent publications include “An International Service Corps for Health: A New Prescription for Diplomacy” in the New England Journal of Medicine and “…One for Doctors Too,” a New York Times opinion piece published in 2010.
IMPACT
Since 2021, Seed has sustained a 60% reduction in maternal deaths in Makeni Regional Hospital in Sierra Leone, where they are the sole nonprofit partner in the hospital’s maternity unit.
With Seed’s support, maternal deaths decreased by 55% over the past year at Bo Regional Hospital in Sierra Leone, prompting the national government, amidst the country’s highest maternal death rates globally, to request Seed’s expansion to additional districts nationally.
Seed joined partners from four ministries of health — Malawi, Sierra Leone, Uganda, and Zambia — as well as Amref Health Africa, in announcing a historic $100 million commitment at the Clinton Global Initiative on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly. The commitment aligns with the Africa CDC vision for a New Public Health Order and will build a pan-African movement to invest in a fit-for-purpose workforce for the continent, which will support global health security.
Seed Global Health News
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What’s Your Start Agenda?Effective change efforts, whether activist movements or social enterprises, must focus beyond just the problem or symptom they want to eliminate. Posted in SSIR on September…Sep 2024 -
These Social Ventures are Scaling Impact by Improving Systems, Not Disrupting ThemPosted in ImpactAlpha on January 18, 2024 By David Blank To learn more about DRK Foundation, contact kshehade@drkfoundation.org. Disrupters have long held the edge in Silicon…Jan 2024 -
How Bad Data Traps People in the US Justice SystemRight now, hundreds of thousands of people are “stuck” in the US criminal justice system. They’ve completed all of their requirements for release, but nobody…Jan 2023 -
Resisting the African ‘brain drain’ that has created a health care crisis“Sub-Saharan Africa has 24% of the world’s global burden of disease, but only 3% of the world healthcare workforce with which to address it.” Vanessa…Sep 2018
