The Role of the Network

The NCDI Poverty Network works to bring lifesaving care to children, adolescents, and young adults doubly burdened with chronic noncommunicable diseases and extreme poverty. The Network represents a coalition of technical, policy, funding, and advocacy partners collaborating with governments to solve one of the world’s starkest inequities. Each organization brings its expertise to different aspects of the systemic change needed to ensure that people living with severe NCDs can access care close to home.

The Network directly oversees clinical care, capacity-building, and research to advance PEN-Plus through two co-secretariats: the Center for Integration Science in Global Health Equity at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, and Universidade Eduardo Mondlane in Maputo, Mozambique.

The Network also coordinates investments in PEN-Plus interventions made independently by partner organizations from around the world. This coordination is managed both formally, through memoranda of understanding and other partnership agreements, and informally, through working groups, technical assistance, and other communication mechanisms. Resources flowing through these multiple organizations, whether financial or in-kind, leverage the infrastructure of public health systems in PEN-Plus countries to move the world collectively toward universal access to care for people living with severe NCDs.

A steering committee governs the Network, providing oversight for its strategy, structure and composition, activities, and partnerships. The committee members represent decades of expertise in management, research, clinical operations, and lived experience with severe, childhood-onset NCDs.