-: My very first project was in global health.
From that time I did a mix of work, primarily in healthcare
a little bit in consumer, and then increasingly
starting back in 2006, I started doing work
in the global public health space for the social sector.
And then increasingly did it more over time.
And now I've had the opportunity to serve
the Gates Foundation and their grantees on over 50
strategy projects over that time, over the last decade.
People regularly ask me, you know, why are you still
at BCG and why don't you just go and work
for one of the big global health partners in the field?
It's because I think
that I can have incredible impact, and we collectively
as a firm have incredible impact in global health
that I wouldn't personally be able to have
if I were working directly for one of the partners.
The first thing that I think we bring is really
strategic perspective, and there are a range
of perspectives that are needed
in order to make global health work well.
In particular, many people in the space
are deep practitioners, either in medicine
or in science, and bring a deep and rich content expertise.
One of the things that we can use to complement that
is we can take their deep content expertise,
which I and our teams don't typically have,
and help to take that and turn it into a really compelling
and impactful strategy.
So the first thing we really bring is strategic perspective.
We also bring really deep expertise on specific topics
from our private sector work that we can then imply
in the public health space.
And a case in point in this, on this is digital.
So digital is of course transforming the world overall
and is going to have incredible impact
when we think about global health.
The world is changing so rapidly and at the forefront
of that change is typically the private sector.
It's companies in Silicon Valley,
it's big bio pharma players, et cetera.
And so our work with those players gives us the opportunity
to have that expertise that we can then bring
into the public health space and help public health
organizations to understand how to harness the value
of digital, to have incredible impact
in public health as well.
There are three different trends that are coming together
to make this possible.
The first is much more powerful and much cheaper hardware.
The second is the improvement in artificial intelligence
and the ability to train machines to do things
that humans used to do.
And then the third thing is much more ubiquitous access
to broadband.
I think people don't think when they think of Africa
they don't think of increased access to broadband,
but by 2030, we expect that Kenya will have 97% access
to 4G technology.
These three things will come together to allow a community
health worker to have the power of the best
medical resident in the world, in the palm of their hand.
And not only will a community health worker have
access to that, but actually individual patients
will be able to seek care rather
than going into a primary health center
and traveling for hours to get there
and then waiting in long lines.
They'll have the ability to immediately seek care
on their phone and get answers to their basic questions.