Introducing the New Leader of Our Work on Global Health and Development Policy

We’re excited to announce that we’ve hired Amanda Glassman as Managing Director of Global Health and Development Policy. In this role, Amanda will oversee our Global Aid Policy and Global Growth funds, as well as a growing portfolio of work on health aid transitions. 

About Amanda

Prior to joining Coefficient Giving, Amanda was with the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), where she served for three years as Executive Advisor to the President. Before that she spent 13 years at the Center for Global Development (CGD) as Director of Global Health Policy, then as Vice President for Programs, and finally as Executive Vice President and CEO of CGD Europe. Earlier in her career she spent more than a decade at the IDB in social development and health roles, and was Deputy Director of the Global Health Financing Initiative at the Brookings Institution. 

Amanda brings years of experience at the intersection of global health policy and development finance, and deep credibility with finance ministries, bilateral donors, and global health leadership. “Amanda has spent her career helping large institutions incorporate cost-effectiveness into their spending decisions,” says Otis Reid, Executive Director of Global Health and Wellbeing. “We think she is unusually well-positioned to identify opportunities and drive forward our impact in this space.” 

From co-authoring G20 panel recommendations to leading working groups that resulted in the establishment of health technology assessment agencies in multiple countries, Amanda understands how multilateral institutions work from the inside. Millions Saved, the CGD series whose latest edition she co-wrote with Miriam Temin, influenced our early thinking on the cost-effectiveness of health policies and programs, and her design of Salud Mesoamérica (a health initiative in Mexico and Central America) brought together development banks and philanthropy with results-based financing.

“I’m inspired by Coefficient Giving’s focus on cost-effectiveness in practice, and excited to work with the stellar Global Aid Policy and Global Growth fund leaders to meet this moment in philanthropy,” says Amanda. “We can save more lives and grow economies faster with evidence and better policy.”

What Amanda will focus on

Amanda will have wide latitude to shape our grantmaking, and we expect our strategy to evolve under her direction. Three things she will focus on:

• Scaling the ambition of our established programs: Global Aid Policy and Global Growth are established programs with experienced leads. Amanda will partner with fund leads to build on our existing work, identify new opportunities that fall between the two portfolios, and strengthen connections across them.
• Expanding our work on health aid transitions: As donor funding has contracted, governments are deciding which donor-funded services they can absorb and which they’ll have to drop. In response, we’ve made nearly $18 million in grants for policy work and technical assistance that help governments manage the transition and get more from their current health budgets. Amanda will scale up this work and refine our theory of change.  
• Developing a new portfolio focused on global health systems policy: Amanda will build a new stream focused on making targeted grants that accelerate regulatory approval of cost-effective global health technologies and strengthen regulatory policy. She will also focus on grants that improve how global health institutions like the Global Fund, WHO, and development banks support governments’ uptake of cost-effective priorities and verify that services reach people.

Amanda is joining at a highly consequential moment for global health and development — global aid has just undergone the sharpest contraction in its history, health systems are reorienting themselves, and the case for economic growth as the primary engine of poverty reduction grows increasingly strong.

We think philanthropy can play an important role in this moment, and few people are better placed than Amanda to drive the work forward. We’re thrilled to have her on board.