Speakers

Carolina Kwok is a Program Officer with Grand Challenges Canada’s Global Health Innovation team, in which capacity she sources and supports innovations as they Transition to Scale. Carolina has over 10 years of experience in implementing and managing global health programs in Africa and Asia. Prior to joining GCC, Carolina worked Clinton Health Access Initiative as a program manager, overseeing market access projects to ensure sustainable and equitable access to the optimal tuberculosis treatment. She has also worked in scaling up HIV counseling and testing, and family planning services, and conducted research in the areas of HIV, MNCH, tobacco policies and multi-drug resistant tuberculosis. Carolina completed her physiotherapy training at McGill University and worked in the areas of neurological rehabilitation in Toronto and Vancouver prior to attaining her MPH from Simon Fraser University.

Hortance Manjo is a project management specialist with over a decade experience is managing projects and leading teams. Hortance is the Country Program Director of the Cameroon Kangaroo Mother Care (KMC) Development Impact Bond (DIB) project. She provides in-country leadership for the rollout of KMC for Low birth weight and pre term babies across Cameroon. This DIB is funding a health practice that will save and improve hundreds of newborn lives in Cameroon. Hortance plays a key role of facilitating the Foundation’s partnerships with the outcome donors, investor, service providers, local and international partners involved in the project.

Hortance worked for several years at Orbis International as the Cameroon Country representative for over five years and led the full range of ORBIS programmes in Cameroon and managed the organisation’s relationship with the Government of Cameroon and partners. In her previous role as Country representative, Hortance was part of national advocacy initiatives that facilitated linkages and networks to support avoidable blindness prevention programmes.

Louise is co-founder of Social Finance and jointly leads our International team. She advises governments, philanthropies and service providers on the design and delivery of social development programmes. Louise is passionate about driving social impact through rigorous analysis, efficient structures and effective cross-sector partnerships. She has particular expertise in outcomes-based approaches and social investment structures. She co-developed the impact bond approach in 2008.

Mara is the Academic Co-Director of the Government Outcomes Lab at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford.

Mara has two decades’ experience in connecting academic insights to decision making for social impact. She has provided input for decisions on Outcome funds and Outcomes Contracts in the UK, the EU, foundations, and international development agencies working in LMICs. In her previous posts she has worked with health policy makers and healthcare providers in the UK, Italy, Ontario and the Global Fund to fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria as well as policy makers at the Home Office, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the Office of the Deputy Prime minister in the UK.

Mara is an economist and experienced decision modeller with an interest in impact metrics and the use of data to inform better decisions. She is particularly passionate about the ways in which governments can work with the private and non-for-profit sector to accelerate progress towards shared goals. She loves making sense of data and currently works on nurturing the INDIGO data collaborative.

Dr. Martina Lukong Baye (MD, MPH) is a physician specialized in Public Health and is greatly interested and involved in the promotion of maternal and child health in her country, Cameroon, and beyond. In line with this, during her term on the Executive Board of the World Health Organization (WHO) as representative of Cameroon (2011 -2014), she strongly advocated for the adoption of the Every Newborn Action Plan.

She is currently the national coordinator of the multisector program to combat maternal, newborn and child mortality in Cameroon. In this capacity, she piloted the development of the RMNCAH investment case within the Global Financing Facility for Every Woman Every Child Initiative and is following up its implementation.

Thomas is a senior economist in the operations policy unit of the World Bank, where he works on evaluating and advising on the design of results-based financing operations worldwide. Before joining this unit, Thomas spent six years preparing and supervising similar operations with sub-national governments in Brazil. He has a PhD in political science from Columbia University and has held research fellowships at Princeton University and the University of Cape Town.