| Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health

Philanthropy Asia Summit Call to Action:

Initial $4M Investment in Emerging Leaders for Education and Training

The ASEAN Health Initiative aims to support organizations, researchers, and leaders across the region in bringing the power of public health to bear on some of the region’s greatest health challenges.

The COVID-19 pandemic made clear that pandemic security rests on a foundation of prevention and preparedness. If we, globally, don’t have better strategies in place, all members of society, but particularly those in vulnerable communities, will face greater risk of unhealthy outcomes.

We need a more resilient health system, one that includes a broader representation of society trained in public health interventions and strategies, as well as innovative opportunities for cross sectoral collaborations.   

 This reality compels us to expand the concept of preparedness across sectors of society far beyond those that provide clinical services to ensure healthier outcomes. Systems of housing, food security, education, and employment are integrally connected to health, yet few leaders in these fields understand how to support prevention and preparedness. A program is needed to share public health training and tools with these fields, many specific to vulnerable populations, by strengthening readiness for emergencies in making these systems more robust every day. 

The ASEAN Health Initiative will:

Train up to 30 emerging leaders annually, representing each ASEAN country and prioritising leaders from non-traditional health organisations.
Focus on central challenges identified by a steering committee representing NUS, JHU, and ASEAN leadership
Establish an annual ASEAN Summit to convene leaders and their organisations to promote sustainable, pragmatic interventions.
Establish Professorships and Challenge Grants to streamline and extend reach.

Investing in Health Resilience

Why Now?

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed glaring needs in global health infrastructure and key areas for investment and improvement of health resilience. Some of these areas that the United States shares with other parts of the world include:

Lack of regional coordination
Lack of trained public health practitioners, particularly in non-traditional public health areas (e.g. housing, supply chain, economic development, policy making)
Exposure of under-studied/considered health challenges (e.g. population-level mental health, medical care distribution, practitioner burnout, public health misinformation)
Recognition of the most vulnerable, especially those disproportionally impacted by the pandemic
Under-utilization of the private and nonprofit sectors to help address public health issues

Why Johns Hopkins University?

The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health was founded in 1916 as the world’s first independent degree-granting school of public health. Home to the world’s first departments of immunology, epidemiology, public health administration, biostatistics, environmental health, international health, and mental health, it remains the largest school of public health in the world, serving nearly 3,700 students from over 97 countries a year, and has ranked #1 among its global peers since rankings began in 1994. Cohorts in the ASEAN Health Initiative would join an expansive and impactful community and gain access to the best of East and West.

In 2016, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Bloomberg Philanthropies invested $300M in the Bloomberg American Health Initiative (BAHI) to develop public health capacity in key areas to improve health and save lives in the United States. The five areas include addiction and overdose, environmental challenges, obesity and the food system, risks to adolescent health, and violence. BAHI provides full scholarships for full- or part-time study and then places fellows back into their home communities with collaborating, cross-sectoral organizations to put their new skills to work. The results have been remarkable: integrating nearly 150 organizations from 40 states, most of them non-traditional public health groups such as libraries, police departments and agricultural extension programs; disseminating national reports, data, policy recommendations, and guidelines in the five focus areas; and producing over 150 fellows per year. Much of the resulting research has influenced lesser appreciated aspects of pandemic response, such as the physical and psychosocial wellbeing of children in underserved neighborhoods. Now over five years into the program, JHBSPH is ready to leverage BAHI’s successes to expand into new areas of inquiry and, with local partners, new regions of the world.

Why ASEAN?

Since its founding, however, JHBSPH has recognized that it is part of a global system and relies on local partners and experts to inform and maximize the impact of public health investment. Ideal regions for collaboration have coordination efforts in place, with room to benefit from an innovative training- and research-focused public health intervention and with resources and institutions to complement collaborative efforts.

Southeast Asia coordinates public health and many other efforts through the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, established in 1967. The ASEAN Charter of 2008 legally binds together ASEAN’s 10 members states, enumerating several responsibilities including providing legal status and institutional frameworks for ASEAN; codifying ASEAN norms, rules, and values; setting clear targets for ASEAN; and presenting accountability and compliance. ASEAN is a registered entity with the Secretariat of the United Nations and is recognized for its successful record of managing public health crises, including COVID-19, avian flu, and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS). A recent USAID-supported project called Partnership for Regional Optimization within the Political-Security and Socio-Cultural Communities (PROSPECT) is building a more formal Public Health Emergency Coordination System within the region. ASEAN clearly offers the connectivity to make optimally effective and scalable public health interventions.

As a geographical group, ASEAN also presents a large, diverse population with unique public health challenges and global economic and sociopolitical influence, promising distinct and generalizable gains from public health investment. Its 655 million people comprise nearly 10% of the world’s population and represent a wide array of ethnic groups and heritages, including the world’s largest Muslim country, Indonesia. It shares certain public health challenges with the West, such as obesity and aging, while confronting others to a much greater degree, including myopia and tropical infectious diseases such as dengue. Southeast Asia possesses the right characteristics to study and prevent diseases unique but pervasive enough to enhance the population of the whole world.

Why Singapore?

ASEAN is investing heavily in becoming a public health standard-bearer, strengthening resources across academia, government, non-profit, and for-profit sectors. Singapore, in particular, is playing a leading role as convener, leveraging its Temasek Foundation to gather philanthropists and coupling the effort with strategic decisions around education and workforce development. The country established strategic institutions such as the Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health (SSHSPH) in 2011 and multiple foreign collaborations such as Duke-NUS to address specific health challenges and expand the health-related workforce. In 2021, Singapore introduced the Philanthropy Asia Summit to pool philanthropic resources and identify key calls to action, with a primary focus on public health. These considerations and Singapore’s geographical centrality among ASEAN nations make the city state a natural hub for an initiative like BAHI, which aims to enhance cross-sectoral collaboration.

We seek support of the ASEAN Health Initiative to incorporate three main components:

$10M

$10M to support the Emerging Leaders Training Program, an annual Health Initiative Summit and Network

$5M

$5M Endowed Professor in ASEAN Health OR two part-time faculty appointments, one at SSHSPH and one at JHBSPH.

$3M

$3M to support the ASEAN Public Health Challenge Grants. A Steering Committee will be formed to guide the development of the grant program. It will include representatives of ASEAN, SSHSPH and JHBSPH. Some initial thoughts are provided below.

Program Details

The Emerging Leaders Training Program is an essential element of The ASEAN Health Initiative. Our goal is to increase public health capacity by providing world-class public health training to individuals engaged with organizations tackling critical health challenges facing the ASEAN region.

When fully implemented, up to 30 emerging leaders annually – at least two from each of the ASEAN nations - will be supported to attend three sessions, each lasting one to two days, over the period of a year at SSHSPH and a weeklong session at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore leading to a certificate in ‘public health problem solving’ with a focus on one of three areas defined by a steering committee representing key ASEAN communities, JHU, and NUS. The areas will be critical public health challenges facing all southeast Asia nations (e.g. obesity, healthy aging, mental health, emerging infectious diseases). These focus areas will be routinely evaluated to ensure The Initiative is focused on priority health challenges.

In between in-person sessions, the emerging leaders will participate in online seminars and workshops. The program will be jointly led by faculty at SSHSPH and the JHBSPH. Within one year, the students, together with representatives from their organizations, will convene for the ASEAN Health Summit featuring the work of the students, their organizations and other leaders in the field. The inaugural Summit will also launch the Initiative Network, designed specifically for ASEAN Health Initiative graduates and faculty to stay connected in order to build stronger alliances, enhance problem solving, to build upon the initial training, and promote pragmatic health interventions. The Network will grow over time with each new cohort, along with connections to the graduate’s organizations, Initiative Funders and the broader SSHSPH and JHBSPH alumni networks.

The emerging leaders and their organizations will join a growing network of scholarship, education and practice devoted to using the tools of public health to address the problems of the 21st century.

Partner organizations will be located across ASEAN and reflect the diversity of efforts addressing critical challenges in the three focus areas. The organizations will come from the health and public health sectors, as well as from housing, transportation, education, environmental protection, community development, and other relevant fields. Special effort will be made to involve organizations that have few or no staff trained in public health.

Each year, The Initiative will competitively fund two to three Challenge Grants which would consist of research or high impact projects tackling one of the three focus areas through the lens of the cross-cutting public health themes of equity, evidence, and policy. Eligible candidates for these grants would include teams of SSHSPH and BSPH faculty together with graduates of the program.

To further build collaborations between SSHSPH, BSPH, an Endowed ASEAN Professorship will be established to support a faculty member at the BSPH who is interested in ASEAN health issues and provide oversight for the program.

In time, the program could expand to offer other degrees such as a Master of Public Health.

Impact

Although it can be dispiriting to contemplate the health challenges facing the ASEAN region as the recent pandemic becomes endemic, it is the nature of public health to tackle seemingly impossible tasks. The ASEAN Health Initiative aims to tap into this spirit and support organizations, researchers, and leaders across the region in bringing the power of public health to bear on some of the region’s greatest health challenges.

Building Capacity

Key to this success is the recruitment and training of graduate student follows representing the ASEAN region, thereby building capacity in public health for the region. Each emerging leader will be recruited from an organization working to address targeted public health challenges. After graduation, these students will return to their organizations for at least one year, during which The Initiative will engage the graduates and their organizations in ongoing collaborations through the Initiative Network. The Network will convene through an online platform to share strategies, innovations and mentorship, as well as through in person meetings at the annual Summit. The Initiative’s goal is to recruit emerging leaders from organizations both inside and outside the traditional boundaries of public health.

Strengthening Systems

Within five years, the Initiative Network will include 100 - 150 trained leaders – 10 in each ASEAN country – and a network of organizations across the private, public, and non-profit sectors, actively working to improve disease prevention and healthy outcomes preparedness, while strengthening the health systems in novel ways. They will meet annually at the ASEAN Health Summit to expand awareness of key issues beyond their community, and they will produce policy recommendations and further system interventions with compounding impact. They also will be invited to other Bloomberg American Health Initiative and Johns Hopkins summits in the United States, sharing expertise across national boundaries and improving global coordination.