What is political will? Why should we care about it? He also asks how can we generate more of it to help us in our work to combat inertia and surmount barriers to creating better access to health and healthcare for the billions of people in need around the globe? How can we explain the different responses to environmental degradation, tobacco control and the HIV/AIDS epidemic when compared to the state of the response to the global epidemic of non-communicable diseases or the call for universal health coverage by 2030? Perspectives from political science and social movement theory point the way to a preliminary explanation.
About the speaker
Dr. Jeff Sturchio is a global health thought leader and trusted counselor for senior leaders in the private sector, multilateral organizations, governments, NGOS and foundations. Jeff is the President and CEO at Rabin Martin. He is former President and CEO of the Global Health Council. Before joining the Council in 2009, Dr. Sturchio was vice president of Corporate Responsibility at Merck & Co. Inc., and president of The Merck Company Foundation.
He is currently also chairman of the U.S. Corporate Council on Africa, chairman of the BroadReach Institute for Training and Education and a member of the boards of ACHAP, Friends of the Global Fight Against AIDS, TB and Malaria and the Science History Institute. Dr. Sturchio is also a visiting scholar at the Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health and the Study of Business Enterprise at Johns Hopkins University; Senior Associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies; a principal of the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network; Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science; a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Arthur W. Page Society; and an advisor to amfAR, Intrahealth International, Partnership for Quality Medical Donations, the Global Health Group at the University of California San Francisco and the Rutgers Global Health Institute. His publications include Noncommunicable diseases in the developing world: addressing global gaps in policy research (edited with L. Galambos, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014) and The Road to Universal Health Coverage: Innovation, Equity and the New Health Economy (edited with I. Kickbusch and L. Galambos, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019).