Can Pakistan’s Health Sector Survive Without USAID?
The abrupt suspension of USAID funding has exposed deep cracks in Pakistan’s healthcare system, leaving clinics shuttered, critical programs halted and millions without essential services. This session asks a pressing question: Can Pakistan’s health sector survive without foreign aid?
Drawing on insights from the book So Much Aid, So Little Development, this session will explore how decades of donor dependence have shaped public health, and why the sudden withdrawal of funding reveals a model built on fragile foundations. The speaker will examine the human cost of this disruption, the policy failures that made it inevitable, and the urgent need to reimagine a more resilient and self-reliant health system for the future.
About the Speaker:
Dr. Samia Altaf is a preventive medicine /public health physician. She graduated from the Fatima Jinnah Medical College, Lahore, and the University of California at Berkeley, and is certified by the American Board of Public Health and Preventive Medicine. She has worked as clinician, teacher, researcher and in health policy. Dr. Altaf was Professor of Public Health Practice at LUMS, and Director of the university’s Covid Response Plan. She is member of Board of Governors of GIKI and of Society for Promotion of Engineering, Science and Technology, and Research Associate at PIDE. She was Senior Advisor to USAID, has worked for UNICEF in Pakistan and for the Washington DC, Department of Health, in the USA. She has consulted for the Government of Pakistan, WHO, CIDA, and Swiss Inter-Cooperation. She was a faculty member at the Aga Khan University Medical College, Karachi. Dr. Altaf writes for popular press and speaks about health issues. She was the 2007-2008 Pakistan Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC. where she wrote her book about Pakistan’s health system “So Much Aid, So Little Development: Stories from Pakistan (2011, JHU press).” An Urdu version of the same manuscript, “Tamasha-e-Ehle Karam” is expected to be published this year.
This session is free and open to all. Just visit the venue to attend it.
The Black Hole
Plot 5H, Street 100, G-11/3, Islamabad.
Click here for Google Maps Location
