Salim Afshar: The Harvard Global Health Institute’s 3rd Annual Global Health Symposium
Salim Afshar, Founder, Chief Medical and Innovation officer at Reveal HealthTech, posted on LinkedIn:
“‘Go back to your mandate.’ That single phrase, shared during the Harvard Global Health Institute’s 3rd Annual Global Health Symposium, carried the weight of hard-earned truth.
It came in a moment of collective reckoning on a panel titled “Displacement and Disparities: Navigating Health Challenges Amid Conflict”. It was shared that over time, humanitarian and global health organizations have quietly but steadily drifted from their core missions, not because of ambition, but because of absence. Ministries and governments left gaps, and well-meaning organizations stepped in.
“We’ve all overflown to fill voids and vacancies… The caravan of two became a caravan of 100.” – Petra Khoury
If you’ve ever built or led a startup, you’ll recognize this for what it is: scope creep. A clear, focused mission expands in response to growing needs, until the very thing that made the work effective gets diluted. In the startup world, this leads to bloated roadmaps, misused resources, and teams stretched beyond capacity.
In global health, it’s worse. It leads to frontline teams doing work they were never resourced or trained to do—absorbing responsibility without authority or support.The problem deepens when funding models don’t align with on-the-ground needs.
One speaker explained:
“If PEPFAR funds HIV, we do HIV. If the donor funds polio, we do polio. We show up in remote villages where no one has seen a health worker for 10 years—and we only deliver two drops of polio vaccine, because that’s all the funding allows.”
This isn’t just inefficient—it’s heartbreaking. Imagine being that lone health worker on a bike, arriving in a community carrying generations of unmet health needs… and being able to offer only a narrow intervention. Not because you lack compassion or skill—but because the system told you to stay in your vertical.
We need to ask harder questions now:
Is our system designed to meet the reality of people’s lives—or the preferences of donors? It’s time we revisit the purpose of these systems. Reaffirm mandates. Rethink funding streams. More reflections to come on my substack, please follow if you want to be part of the discussion and cocreate. a new future.
Thank you to Harvard Global Health Institute and Harvard Humanitarian Initiative for this panel.
You can watch the live webinar today and join for day 2 tomorrow.”
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