The Paul E. Farmer Butaro Dialogues

The global health landscape is at an inflection point. The post-pandemic period has revealed the fragility of health systems, the threat of reduced donor financing, and the urgency of accelerating transitions in global philanthropy and leadership, particularly on the African continent.

At the same time, a new generation of transformative technologies and innovations, including artificial intelligence, digital diagnostics, community health platforms, and genomics, is creating genuine opportunities to close equity gaps at scale.

Yet a persistent structural disconnect prevents these opportunities from reaching the communities that need them most:

• Medical and public health schools train the next generation without curricula that reflect the most promising innovations in health delivery.
• Researchers generate evidence that takes years to reach implementation in national health systems.
• Governments adopt solutions in isolation, without the learning networks that could accelerate scale.
• Global convenings gather power at the top without meaningfully including future leaders, community voices, or emerging-economy innovators.

Maternal and neonatal health offers the starkest illustration of this failure. Despite decades of evidence and sustained global commitment, preventable maternal and neonatal deaths remain a daily reality across sub-Saharan Africa.

This is not a knowledge failure. It is a systems failure: a failure of translation, adoption, financing, and political will. It is one that a well-designed convening can begin to address.

The Butaro Dialogues was conceived to bridge these gaps. It is not another conference. It is a structured, action-oriented process designed to accelerate the introduction, adoption, and scaling of innovations that close health equity gaps, with maternal and neonatal health as a non-negotiable thematic anchor.