IFC Health Newsletter | February 2023

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

We hope you were among the more than 500 people who joined us in Cape Town last month for IFC’s Global Private Health Conference. It was an incredible two days with a range of panel discussions, events, and plenty of networking. I personally had the opportunity to learn a lot from the industry leaders, meet up with existing and potential new partners, and most importantly, enhance my understanding of how IFC can best support our existing and new clients across the health value chain in our mission to build resilient health systems. This month, I would like to share with you a few videos from the conference. I hope you enjoy them as much as I did.

As always, we welcome comments and suggestions for innovative health leaders that we can interview for our newsletter. Please feel free to reach out to me directly or to our communications team lead, Aliza Marcus, at amarcus@ifc.org. 

Regards,

Zeynep Kantur Ozenci

Global Head of Health

Why do the private and public health sectors need each other? 

Farid Fezoua, IFC Director of Health and Education, and the World Bank’s Juan Pablo Uribe, Global Director for Health, Nutrition, and Population, answered this question in 2 minutes.

Why does innovation matter? 

Farid Fezoua and Sérgio Pimenta, IFC’s Vice President for Africa, talked about innovating to bridge health service gaps and strengthen health systems in emerging markets. 

And what can we do to bring more women into healthcare?

Sanola Daley, IFC’s Gender Lead, and Nicole Spieker, CEO at PharmAccess, explain why real access to care requires women in health leadership positions.

Conference News

Whether or not there is a business case for quality in healthcare is a subject under great debate. Healthcare Business International covered the panel discussion on the cost of quality care and its short- and long-term implications on health systems at IFC’s 9th Global Private Health Conference in Cape Town last month.

“We must help countries to be more self-reliant on production and create a trained workforce for decent outcomes. The public sector cannot do it alone,” said Farid Fezoua in a BizNews article on the role of the private sector in elevating the standard of care in South Africa.

IFC Investments

União Química, a Brazilian life sciences company, will expand the production and distribution capacity of medicines and vaccines in the country through a US$65 million loan from IFC. The investment will enable União Química to increase its manufacturing capacity for antibiotics, corticoids, anti-inflammatories, and other medicines by 13 percent by 2027.

Publication

In a blog, Farid Fezoua and Juan Pablo Uribe explained how partnerships between private and public sectors are necessary to support universal health coverage goals. 

Contest Winner

Congratulations to Avenue Hospital Parklands in Kenya for winning IFC's first "The Business Case for Quality" contest and runner-up, Clínicas del Azúcar, in Mexico. Administrators at these hospitals have implemented patient safety practices that align with global quality standards.