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We support country leaders to build strong systems and institutions that improve access to high-quality, affordable health care, improve educational opportunities for children, and reduce malnutrition.
Systems change is inherently hard. It’s even harder when country leaders don’t get the kind of support they need. At R4D we go beyond traditional technical assistance, pioneering new approaches to support country leaders.
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We partner with country governments, local organizations and donor institutions in two ways:
We work alongside our partners through each stage of the systems change process — helping them drive their agenda, identify root causes of challenges, develop and implement solutions, and continuously learn and adapt to sustain outcomes.
We support country leaders to uncover the root causes of the challenges they’re facing. And we help them identify and synthesize relevant experience from other countries across our network that have tackled similar problems, turning global experience and innovative ideas into practical insights that help leaders make informed decisions.
We help country leaders bring together the right stakeholders to co-create effective solutions. As skilled facilitators, our team engages diverse voices in meaningful dialogue, helping strengthen processes, foster buy-in, and co-design solutions that are more likely to succeed.
We support country leaders to implement their solutions with an emphasis on learning-by-doing. R4D’s Coaching Approach works through existing infrastructure and processes — avoiding the creation of parallel systems. This approach strengthens national institutions to deliver over the long-term.
We support country leaders to learn what’s working — and what isn’t — to continuously adapt, iterate and improve. Our approach prioritizes answering the questions our partners care about, using methods that are feasible. This builds resilience and helps strengthen institutions’ capacity to embed learning into their future work.
We strengthen local organizations’ capacity to produce evidence and provide the support country leaders need. We connect them to regional and global networks, and help global partners coordinate their efforts.
Our approach supports and elevates local expertise and organizations to ensure they continue supporting country leaders long after global funding ends. We complement and strengthen our local partners’ capabilities — positioning them as the go-to resources for both national and global actors.
We create and strengthen learning communities and networks that generate evidence, support change agents to learn from one another and co-create promising new approaches. Our Collaborative Learning approach is always country led and centers the expertise of local change agents.
We work with development partners to ensure their strategies and programs are coordinated and aligned with country leaders’ priorities — making investments more responsive, sustainable and impactful. This also reduces the burden on country leaders to navigate and manage competing priorities.
R4D is a mission-driven organization. We’re proud of what we can achieve in just one year.
10k+
Change agents supported
Building skills, knowledge, and networks to drive equitable change.
130+
New knowledge products
Connecting change agents to critical evidence and supporting them to use it.
40
Systems changes documented
Improving government policies, financing and institutions to deliver sustainable change.
31
Learning networks launched or strengthened
Connecting global change agents to share learning, co-create solutions, and drive progress together.
Our team of 150+ experts in 9 countries unites local knowledge with global experience and learning networks.
National health policies don’t always reflect the realities of implementation at the local level. R4D is working with Indonesia's Ministry of Health and Universitas Gadjah Mada to build and test a structured, two-way feedback mechanism to bring local experience into national policymaking. Can stronger feedback loops lead to better health policy? Find out what Indonesia is learning as it puts this approach into practice.
Now that the old model for funding and delivering technical assistance in global health has substantially collapsed, the question is: What, if anything, replaces it? R4D Managing Director Cheryl Cashin and Director General and CEO of Nigeria’s National Health Insurance Authority Kelechi Ohiri argue that this disruption creates a once-in-a-generation opportunity to build something better: a demand-driven, country-led system where governments can access the expertise they need, when they need it, and technical support is defined by government priorities, aligned execution and measurable results.
Ambitious health system reforms often collide with limited resources, weak implementation capacity and political disruptions. Successful reform is rarely about waiting for perfect conditions or large influxes of funding. Drawing on experiences from five countries, find out how health system planners are making steady progress toward universal health coverage despite real-world constraints.
Ensuring that young children not only survive but thrive requires more than stand-alone early childhood programs. It requires health systems that make nurturing care — the conditions children need to reach their full developmental potential: good health, adequate nutrition, responsive caregiving, opportunities for early learning and safety and security — part of routine primary health care. Leaders in Kenya, Tanzania and Mozambique are putting that idea into practice. Learn how.
Nathaniel Otoo, former CEO of the Ghana National Health Insurance Authority.
Susan Sparkes, Health Economist, World Health Organization
Catherine Hollander, Senior Program Associate, GiveWell
Jean-Paul Dossou, Director of CERRHUD, Benin
Abdulkadir Galgalo, Director General for the Ethiopian Pharmaceutical Supply Service
Fauzia Waqar, Centre for Economic Research in Pakistan (CERP)
