Program Overview: What is G-Lab Global Health Delivery?

Global Entrepreneurship Lab, MIT Sloan’s flagship international project-based class, pairs students with real-world enterprises wrestling with management challenges across the globe. The new Global Health Delivery (GHD) version of G-Lab tackles practical constraints to delivering health care in resource-poor settings in Africa. Guided by MIT Sloan faculty and Global Health Delivery Project experts, graduate student teams apply professional management skills, tools, and approaches to pressing real-world problems that their hosts define, drawing on their classroom learning to work on the ground to create effective improvements that provide patients with the healthcare they need.

Why global health delivery? Too often, health care fails to reach the neediest. Systems for delivering health care in resource-poor settings can be fragmented and under-developed. Information management, logistics, process design, business development, and workforce management may be inappropriate. Knowledge about effective approaches may fail to spread.

How does it work? Potential partners describe their pressing problems. If there’s a good fit, the free collaboration ramps up over the summer. In September, each team of four MBA and graduate students pairs with a host (although not all projects are taken up). Teams work part-time from MIT for three months, then full-time on-site in January 2010, ending with a final presentation of the work and findings. The collaboration wraps up in February.

How is this possible? Our framework is MIT Sloan’s flagship international project-based class, Global Entrepreneurship Lab, through which hundreds of student teams have worked with small businesses and growing organizations across the globe, applying management skills, tools, and approaches to solve problems their hosts identify. Our global health focus is enabled by the expertise and resources of our partners at the Global Health Delivery Project, which works to transform health care delivery in developing countries. Students are unpaid and no fees are involved. We share student travel costs with hosts as needed.

Join us! The G-Lab GHD team seeks practical, operational health care delivery projects. Hosts may be clinics, NGOs, start-ups, for-profit firms or other types of organizations operating in Africa that work directly in health care or else work closely with health care workers—doctors, nurses, community health workers, or their administrators, technical support personnel, or managers. Our particular focus areas for 2009-10 are:

process improvement and supply chain management;
reaching and serving patients, including via pricing, income generation, and marketing or information dissemination; or
developing new lines of business or organizational models to increase sustainability.

We hope to find partners in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Ghana, Zambia, or South Africa (possibly Rwanda or Malawi).

To learn more about past G-Lab GHD projects, please see the Projects tab on this site or visit last year’s class blog.

We welcome any ideas, suggestions, and comments; and if you would like to collaborate on any other aspect of the course, please let us know.