Global Health

Epidemics and other global health threats affect individuals, families, and societies, and inflict costs that weaken the entire world economy. The numbers are staggering:

12 billion spent in direct costs related to malaria

The CDC cites $12 billion is spent annually in direct costs related to malaria, with much more lost in economic growth.

216 million people infected with malaria in 2016

In 2016 alone, 216 million people were infected with malaria, and 450,000 died. More than two-thirds of all malaria deaths are in children younger than five years old.

The 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa spread fast—with more than 26,000 suspected or confirmed cases recorded by May 2015.

Zika outbreaks have occurred in 69 countries, and evidence indicates that the virus is becoming endemic in many parts of the world.

African continent has 2% of the world's doctors

The African continent has as much as 54% of the world’s communicable diseases—but only 2% of the world’s doctors.

61% of world's citizens lack access to safely managed sanitation

Some 61% of the world’s citizens—4.5 billion people—lack access to safely managed sanitation, such as toilets.

Three Ways Organizations Can Help Solve Global Health Challenges

As organizations in every sector rally to achieve the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, three new approaches can help them surmount these and other global health challenges:

Learn from other sectors. Aid agencies can take a page from private-sector approaches, such as human-centered design and consumer insights, to tackle low-quality health care in emerging economies.
Create proactive partnerships. Governments can partner with corporations in emergency preparedness and response efforts before a crisis hits.
Embrace disruption. Forward-thinking companies across the value chain can embrace disruptive technologies that improve global health and tap into valuable revenue streams.

These and other innovations could help make health care systems in lower income countries more efficient, effective, and adaptive by enabling them to leapfrog over long development timelines. By making these critical changes, emerging economies can thereby accomplish much more with much less.

Combating global health challenges will never be easy. But by forging new partnerships that leverage their diverse and complementary capabilities and embracing new technologies, organizations can come together to ease the widespread suffering caused by these health problems.

Learn More About Global Health

Three Principles to Guide Africa’s COVID-19 Response

African governments must develop a response that is comprehensive, adaptive, and implemented effectively in order to take fast action in several areas.

Critical Priorities for Pharma and Medtech in Response to COVID-19

In their response to COVID-19, pharma and medtech companies have been true to their purpose. They now face questions that go beyond addressing the virus itself.

Learning from COVID-19 to Transform Global Health Systems

Innovative practices in response to the crisis suggest an emerging model for fighting any disease and managing populations’ health.

Six Ways to Speed Progress on the Health SDGs

To meet the UN’s health-related Sustainable Development Goals, NGOs and low-income countries will have to do two to four times as much with every dollar that they currently spend.

Tech Disruption Comes to Global Sanitation

The humble toilet is undergoing a transformation, unlocking a vast new opportunity—not just to capture value but also to change lives.

How Will Artificial Intelligence Change Health Around the Globe?

Four opportunity areas hint at the promise of AI in global health.

Managing the Risk and Impact of Future Epidemics

A report by the World Economic Forum, written with BCG, analyzes which aspects of the Ebola response worked well and where the effort fell short.

What the Ebola Crisis Can Teach Us About Zika

BCG’s Wendy Woods discusses one strategy we have learned from the Ebola crisis can help change Zika’s trajectory: balancing a people-centric approach with a virus-centric approach.

Improving Global Health Using Private Sector Approaches

A Unique Impact in Global Health

How Motivation Can Fix Public Systems

Eine neue Zukunft für Gesundheitssysteme in Afrika

A Netflix Model Can Make Medical Treatments More Affordable

A New Vision for Fighting Malaria

BCG collaborates with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to shift the world’s focus from controlling the disease to eradicating it.

Smarter Ways to Fight Ebola

Working closely with the World Health Organization, BCG supported the initial design of the Ebola response and developed a novel 30-60-90 day plan to get the epidemic under control.

Center for Health Care Value

BCG's Center for Health Care Value offers tailored solutions to organizations seeking to adopt value-based health care.

Meet Some of BCG's Experts in Global Health

BCG's consultants and industry experts focusing on global health continue to partner with leading social organizations, corporations, nonprofits, and philanthropic bodies to arrive at solutions for epidemics and health care access. These are some of our experts on this topic.