Dr. Abdul Ghaffar
Abdul Ghaffar, MD, PhD serves as Senior Technical Advisor at the Foundation, where he oversees operational and strategic program development within the domain of Healthcare & Development.
Dr. Ghaffar has extensive experience as a physician, professor, scientist, and senior executive in the UN and government. His distinguished career spans more than 35 years, with leadership roles at the Ministry of Health of Pakistan, Health Services Academy, Islamabad, and the World Health Organization.
Dr. Ghaffar has served as the Executive Director of the Alliance for Health Policy and Systems Research at the World Health Organization. Before joining the Alliance, he served as Regional Advisor for Research, in the Eastern Mediterranean Office of the World Health Organization. Dr. Ghaffar also worked as a Health Policy and Systems Specialist at the Global Forum for Health Research in Geneva. In his home country (Pakistan), he started his career as a public health physician and later worked in different leadership positions as Assistant Director-General of Policy and Planning; Deputy Director-General of International Health; and Director of the Health Services Academy, a national school of public health.
He has advised many governments in the use of evidence for stronger health systems, helped establish policy and research institutes, served on the technical and advisory boards, published more than 140 peer-reviewed papers, and led the writing and development of some prestigious global health reports, such as WHO’s Strategy on Health Policy and Systems Research.
Dr. Ghaffar is a physician by training with a Ph.D. in Health Systems from Johns Hopkins University.