The pandemic showed the world that the health of individuals, communities, and nations rests on a whole host of factors beyond their control. Covid-19 served as both a catalyst and spotlight for centuries-old socioeconomic and geopolitical inequalities to come to the fore.

Even with ventilators and vaccines, on-the-ground healthcare was not enough to counter these forces. Infrastructure development, supply chain innovation, and behavioral change was needed to drill down to the root causes of the global health disparities at play.

We must recognize that health is four-dimensional

When we see health in “four dimensions” — spanning education, culture, infrastructure, and economic development– we gain a more holistic understanding of health as we actually experience it on a day-to-day basis.

This 4-dimensional approach is at the core of Making More Health (MMH), a partnership between Ashoka and Boehringer Ingelheim. Since its launch in 2010, MMH has impacted 10 million lives and counting. By 2025, MMH aims to grow the global network to 250 social innovators, tripling the population impacted to 30 million.

It’s time to broaden health’s horizons

At Making More Health Together — the collaboration’s global gathering — over 750 entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs, changemakers, and health actors united to discuss the part their work plays in a collective paradigm shift that will broaden our understanding of what health is.

We heard from Ashoka Fellows, Krystian Fikert, Shona Mcdonald, and Andrés Rubiano, who discuss the importance of strong community, shared responsibility, and sturdy infrastructure to fostering a vision of Health that accounts for the full picture. Here’s a snapshot.

Community promotes health

In Ireland, as in many countries across Europe, mental health support is lacking. Public offerings have long waiting times and private offerings have hefty price tags, leading to a situation in which mental healthcare has become a luxury instead of a basic necessity.

Through a community-based support model, Krystian Fikert saw a chance to change that. So MyMind was born — a platform offering face-to-face and virtual mental health support designed to promote a culture of early intervention and shared learning that tackles social stigma, removes inaccessible costs, and bypasses lengthy waiting lists.

He’s even using Artificial Intelligence to make the process smoother for everyone involved. Hear more from Krystian.

Health is not an individual responsibility

Everyone has the right to feel healthy, but not everyone has the resources. As Shona Mcdonald saw, individuals with disabilities are often unwelcome and underserved by the communities they’re part of, offered ‘one-size-fits-all’ solutions that don’t meet their individual needs.

To tackle this problem, she created Shonaquip Social Enterprise — an organization that helps children with mobile disabilities living in peri-urban and rural areas of Southern Africa, where the standard European folding frame wheelchairs are not suitable for developing bodies or for the environment in which they need to be used.

In her words, the aim is to “shift the responsibility of wheelchair provision from its history in charity to health systems, social justice, and human rights organizations”. In doing so, she’s seen families and their communities reap physical, social, and economic rewards, removing a stigma that undervalues disabled children by perceiving them as a burden to their families and society in general. Discover more in this session.

Health is reliant on infrastructure

The pandemic clearly showed that emergency healthcare can’t serve the urgent needs of communities without the right infrastructure in place to deliver it.

Andrés Rubiano has been tackling this very challenge for almost a decade prior to the Covid-19 pandemic. His organization, Fundación Meditech, worked to establish infrastructure in Colombian public sector institutions to provide proactive, coordinated responses to trauma victims in need of emergency support.

As he found, infrastructure-building goes beyond training and resourcing. In areas with strong social networks, capacity for disaster response is higher than those without.

As Andrés puts it, “even if you have a small collaboration or a small partnership, the response that you are creating will help to build the system for other types of emergencies” (related or otherwise).

Hear more from Andrés in this session.

The future of health is holistic

If Covid taught us anything, it’s that every person, at every level of society, has a part to play in making a healthier and more inclusive world for us all.

Call it cross-sector collaboration or simply call it a mindset shift — the first step to creating sustainable community health is developing a more holistic understanding of it.

About Making More Health Together

The global event, Making More Health Together, united more than 800 participants over the course of two days to celebrate the first ten years of collaboration between Ashoka and Boehringer Ingelheim. The theme, ‘Co-Creating for a Brighter Future’, set the agenda for the partnership’s mission to create a healthier world for individuals, animals, and their communities.

In 2021, the event hosted over 40 sessions related to human health, animal health, and social innovation. You can access all the recordings here.