Abt’s decade-long evaluation of AgResults explains how its approach works (and doesn’t) to spur uptake of commercial innovations in emerging economies.

The Abt-led USAID Local Health System Sustainability Project created a logistics management information system for TB drugs in Vietnam.

What is humanity’s best defense against a pandemic or other major threat? You’d be partially right to think: high-tech equipment in gleaming new health facilities, a computer farm in the cloud to collect and share data, highly qualified clinical staff, vast sums for vaccine research and development, and expansive budgets funding expensive national public health systems.

Health systems strengthening efforts increasingly focus on integrating fragmented initiatives financed by donors into country-led and financed programs.

The AgResults initiative was created by five donors after the 2010 G20 summit. The donors recognized that their resources alone could not significantly reduce poverty in the world’s poorest countries. They created AgResults to test whether pay-for…