In late September, I attended meetings at the United Nations General Assembly and the World Economic Forum’s Sustainable Development Impact Meetings, both held simultaneously in New York. What gets the most attention at those meetings is the announcements: a new commitment, a partnership, a funding pledge. The room applauds, the photos go up, and everyone moves to the next conversation.
I understand why an announcement matters. It puts an issue on the agenda. It brings partners to the table. It gives a team the mandate to move. But what I keep coming back to is the work we rarely see. The conversations that started months or years earlier, the trust built across institutions, and the decisions that still have to be made after everyone flies home.
That’s where progress in health happens.
We Need to Get Better at Finding One Another
I spent full days talking with leaders working on diagnostics, health systems, financing, and access, and still left knowing I’ve seen only a fraction of the work underway. Someone else has been tackling the same barrier in a different country, with a different set of constraints. A team may already have learned something that could save the rest of us years.
We don’t hear about it because health work is often organized into silos. That’s how institutions fund, measure, and manage it. Governments have their priorities. Companies have products to build. Nonprofits have communities to serve. Investors have decisions to make. Each has a legitimate role.
But the patient experiences the whole system. She needs a clinic she can reach, a trained provider, the right equipment, an affordable service, and a path to follow-up care. Progress on one piece matters, but it can’t carry the entire journey.
Partnership Is More Than a Shared Stage
Collaboration has to go beyond sharing a stage or signing a statement. It means asking where our work connects, what’s missing between those points, and who’s responsible for closing the gap. It means being honest when another organization or country has already solved part of the problem better than we have.
I felt a lot of pressure to come back from these meetings with a revolutionary idea. Sometimes a new approach is exactly what’s needed. Often the more useful question is simpler: what’s already working, and how do we help it reach more people?
A screening program that makes it easier for women to get care is progress. So is a better referral process, a device that fits into an existing workflow, or an arrangement that lets a clinic keep providing services. These changes can look incremental. For the woman whose diagnosis comes earlier, or whose care no longer requires a day of travel, they’re significant.
Improve What Exists While Building What’s Next
I’m wary of treating disruption as a goal in itself. Health systems have deep flaws, and many need substantial change. They’re also the systems people depend on today. You can’t casually tear out a service while patients are still using it. The harder work is improving what exists while building the capacity to do more.
Jacaranda Health in Kenya is one of the clearest examples I know. I visited one of their clinics in Nairobi in 2019. Their early model was a clinic, but one facility, no matter how well it runs, can’t shift national outcomes. So they built PROMPTS, a two-way SMS service that helps women seek care at the right time and place, and embedded it in public health facilities. Instead of building more clinics, Jacaranda made the public system stronger from within. Today it reaches mothers across Kenya, Ghana, and Eswatini.
That kind of model can’t simply be copied. Countries and regions have different resources, policies, and histories. We have a lot to gain by studying places that have made measurable progress, understanding why their approach worked, and adapting the useful parts.
That goes for companies and organizations too. Pride and ego are a poor reason to start from zero.
No One Is Winning Health Alone
The scale of the need can be difficult to hold in your head at a global meeting. Every conversation opens another one. There’s more work than any single company, nonprofit, government, or coalition can take on. No one is “winning” health while large groups of people can’t get the care they need. That should make us more ambitious and more willing to share what we learn.
For me, the health of women is central to this work. We can’t talk seriously about stronger economies, resilient communities, or better health systems while treating it as a separate issue for later. Women need access to care across their lifespan, and that access reaches far beyond one appointment or one diagnosis. It shapes whether they can work, care for others, take part in their communities, and make decisions about their futures.
I left the UNGA and WEF meetings grateful for the people doing the quiet, sustained work between public milestones. I also left with a sharper question for myself: who else needs to be involved for this effort to improve someone’s life?
The announcement may be the catalyst. Progress shows up later, when a commitment survives the meeting, crosses an institutional boundary, and reaches a person who needs it.