This week we launched the long-awaited 17th year of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law's Draper Hills Summer Fellowship Program. Founded in 2005 with generous support from Bill and Phyllis Draper and Ingrid von Mangoldt Hills, Draper Hills is an executive training program for world leaders striving to promote democracy. For the next two weeks, Fellows will participate in workshops led by an interdisciplinary team of faculty to study new theories and approaches to democratic development.

Fellows in the class of 2021 were selected from among thousands of applicants for their ground-breaking work to defend democracy. These 34 leaders drawn from 30 countries around the world are pioneering new approaches and models to advance social and political change in some of the most challenging global contexts. Representing business, government, and the nonprofit sector, our fellows are working on the frontlines of democratic change to combat the global rise of authoritarianism and populism. In countries moving towards democracy, our fellows are working to institutionalize new systems and practices to support democratic transitions.

An Unconventional Year

Traditionally, Fellows would travel from their home countries to the U.S. and spend three weeks on campus at Stanford learning together. However, due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the program is currently taking place virtually for the first time (for the same reasons, the program did not run in 2020). The shift to online programming posed a number of logistical obstacles – from what time to run virtual sessions when participants span over a dozen time zones, to how to foster the sense of belonging and personal connections that occur more naturally with in-person settings.

To begin addressing the latter, Fellows were sent welcome packages to build excitement and foster community both within the program and Stanford. Upon receiving hers, Aisha Yesufu of Nigeria shared "I am so excited at the different people I'll be meeting from all over the world, and also learning from different people, lecturers, professors... It's going to be quite interesting and, for me, that is what I am most looking forward to," along with the video below:

"One of the most important things I have ever been involved with."

Opening against the backdrop of the fall of Kabul to the Taliban in Afghanistan, the importance of the Draper Hills program and the need to promote democratic change is now more evident than ever.

The inaugural session for the 2021 cohort began with Francis Fukuyama introducing the fellows to several of the esteemed faculty they will be learning from over the next two weeks, including Larry Diamond, Erik Jensen, and Michael McFaul. McFaul shared that not only did he found the program, but "it is one of the most important things I have ever been involved with." Jensen later added that "participating in this program is one of the great pleasures I have every year."

More to Come

Throughout the next two weeks, our Draper Hills Fellows will examine the political development, democratic transitions, and the relationship of law to economic development, public administration, administrative law, transitional justice, food security, and global health policy, among others. The group is eager to learn, and we look forward to seeing the many great things the training they receive here will enable them to do in their home countries and beyond.

This article was first published by the social and political economy portal IndiaSpend.

Women from poor households made about 235,000 fewer hospital visits compared to men for seven gender-neutral disease categories between January 2017 and October 2019, a new study analyzing a Rajasthan state health insurance scheme has estimated. The Bhamashah Swasthya Bima Yojana aims to provide health insurance to about 46 million persons living below the poverty line, as a step towards universal and equitable access to healthcare in the state, per the study.

Pascaline Dupas and Radhika Jain of Stanford University studied data of insurance claims from 4.2 million hospital visits under the Bhamashah scheme from its launch in December 2015 till October 2019, and the study was published as a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper. The study was conducted in partnership with the Rajasthan state government.

Women made up 45% of hospital visits under the Bhamashah scheme between January 2017 and October 2019, though their share in the population is 48%, per the study. The gender gap is starker for girls and older women. The share of girls in children aged under 10 years who visited the hospital under this insurance program was 33%, though their share of this age group's population is 47%; among those aged above 50 years, women are 51%, yet their share of hospital visits under this insurance program was 43%.

"We were struck by this discrepancy in the data. We were not expecting such a large [gender] difference," Dupas, an economist and professor at Stanford University, told IndiaSpend. In most other developed countries for which such data have been analyzed, subsidized healthcare usually caters to those who otherwise don't have access to it, added Jain, a postdoctoral fellow in Asia Health Policy at Stanford University, US.

This opinion piece was first published in the economics and policy portal Ideas for India.

Equity in healthcare is a key goal of health policy in India. Analyzing administrative data from Rajasthan, this article highlights substantial gender gaps in the utilization of subsidized hospital care under the state health insurance program. These disparities persist despite substantial program expansion and seem to be driven by households being less willing to allocate resources to female vis-à-vis male health.

Over the past 15 years, India’s central government and numerous state governments have put in place health insurance programmes that entitle low-income households to free healthcare at public and empanelled private hospitals. Health equity and universal health coverage are explicit goals of these programs. In new research, we study gender equity in the Bhamashah Swasthya Bima Yojana (BSBY)1 health insurance program, which was launched in the state of Rajasthan in 2015, and is similar in design to the national Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana (PMJAY).

Our starting point is a dataset of insurance claims filed for all 4.2 million hospital visits between 2015 and 2019, including patient age, gender, residence address, hospital visited, dates of admission and discharge, and service(s) received. We geo-coded hospital locations and patient addresses, which allowed us to calculate proximity to hospitals and the distance traveled for every hospital visit. Finally, we linked the insurance data to the 2011 Census and data on three rounds of village-level (gram panchayat) elections. To our knowledge, the dataset we compiled from these various sources is the first dataset of its type in India and allows us to study care-seeking under insurance with unusual granularity.