The multi-faceted Abundance Project for Global Health helps to build on-the-ground capacity to respond to emergencies, and treat and prevent disease through medical education and health system strengthening around the globe.  The Project increased opportunities for the training of global health professionals, supported breakthrough research, and increased accessibility to information for medical professionals worldwide.

Since its inception, the Abundance Foundation has identified gaps in global health care delivery and funded innovative solutions to closing them while working to empower a new generation of health care leaders who will be able to implement solutions and deliver better care. The foundation supported research into the containment of epidemics such as cholera and Ebola, programs to provide advanced training for global medical professionals and interventions to reduce disparities in healthcare. Its programmatic successes include:

• Crucial Early Support for Ebola Research: Early in the Ebola crisis, Abundance Foundation partnered with the Harvard Medical School Global Health Research Core, ensuring funding for research, published in The Lancet, that showed how to accurately diagnose Ebola patients within minutes. With bedside diagnostics as easy to use as a pregnancy test, this finding has had a major impact on the diagnosis, treatment and prevention of Ebola.

• Cholera Vaccinations in Haiti: After the devastating earthquake in Haiti created the perfect storm for a cholera epidemic, Dr. Louise Ivers successfully vaccinated 100, 000 Haitians against the disease and changed the way the infectious disease community looks at cholera control with her research published in The Lancet.

• Creating World-class Health Education in Rwanda: The Rwanda Human Resources for Health program (HRH) program created a sustainable, world-class health education structure for training and retaining highly skilled and diverse medical professionals in Rwanda. When President Clinton announced the Rwanda Human Resources for Health Program (HRH) at the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) in 2012, he honored Chief Abundance Partner Corrado Cancedda, M.D. Ph.D. among others, for his role in the development of this program. Of the HRH program President Clinton said, “I think it is one of the most important commitments ever announced at CGI.”

• Global Mental Health: Giuseppe Raviola, M.D. Director of Mental Health for Partners In Health, said: “The Abundance Foundation’s investment in global mental health care delivery and research led to an infinite number of positive developments in terms of fostering new, major, government-run national mental health initiatives in a number of countries and the development of over 50 careers in mental health service delivery and research for implementers working in low income countries. All of this work, taken together, led to needed, lifesaving mental health services for more than 20, 000 people in Haiti, Rwanda, and elsewhere.”

• Innovative Harvard Medical School Master’s Programs: In order to build local capacity and leadership in resource-limited countries, Abundance Foundation partnered with Harvard Medical School to develop a Masters of Medical Science in Global Health Delivery (MMSc-GHD). A rigorous cross-university curriculum focused on social and delivery science and policy research in resource-limited settings, the program contributes to global health scholarship while enhancing the quality of health care delivery and training available in countries including Haiti, Rwanda, and Sierra Leone.

• Emergency Medicine Residency in Haiti: Emergency and Family Medicine Residency programs built capacity and local leadership by training physicians and nurses with especially robust programs in the emergency department at the new Hôpital Universitaire de Mirebalais.

• Free Access to Life-Saving Medical Reference Tools: Investment in the Global Health Delivery Project at Harvard University (GHD) has helped create the premier online space, GHDonline, where health professionals throughout the world can connect. With over 20, 000 participants representing 168 countries, GHDonline plays an essential role in health care delivery knowledge dissemination, learning and training. Furthermore, in partnership with UpToDate, the Global Health Delivery Project provided free access to world-class evidence-based clinical resources to 20, 000+ clinicians in 20+ institutions in 60+ countries, caring for more than 25 million patients per year. This program has led to an ongoing pilot that aims to provide every medical school in Africa with these essential digital medical training tools.

• Unique Partnerships between Harvard Graduate Students and Community Health Centers: The Agents of Change program was designed to address health inequities by challenging students across Harvard’s graduate schools to create cross-disciplinary teams and develop partnerships with community health centers in order to develop out-of-the-box solutions for empowering marginalized and economically disadvantaged communities.