Sixth National Flagship Course on Health Systems Strengthening for India
The India Health Systems Reform Project at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, in collaboration with the Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI), recently hosted the 6th National Flagship Course on Health Systems Strengthening for India from January 15 to 20, 2026, in New Delhi. This year’s cohort brought together senior policymakers from Assam, Bihar, Meghalaya, Odisha, and Uttar Pradesh, including officials from the Departments of Health and Planning, the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), and the National Institute of Health and Family Welfare (NIHFW).
Launched in 2017, the National Flagship Course for India is an executive education program designed to strengthen the health policy leadership of senior national and state-level decision-makers. The course is built upon the Flagship Framework jointly developed by Harvard faculty and the World Bank. The primary objectives of the course are to provide participants with analytical approaches and tools to assess their health systems’ performances, diagnose root causes of underperformance, and develop policy and management reforms that are guided by ethical considerations, evidence-based, and politically feasible.
The India Flagship Course is specifically tailored to the context of India’s national and state-level health systems. Instructions include lectures, case studies, group work, and debates.
Winnie Yip, principal investigator of the India Health Systems Project, is the course director. The course’s curriculum is designed and delivered in collaboration with Harvard colleagues (William Hsiao, Anuska Kalita, Kevin Croke, and Ole Norheim) and other India-based (Arti Ahuja, former Union Secretary of the Government of India; Himanshu Negandhi of PHFI) and global (Ajay Tandon, Somil Nagpal, Sheena Chhabra, Aarushi Bhatnagar, and Om Prakash Kansal from the World Bank; Abdo Yazbeck from Johns Hopkins University) experts.
The course is made possible through a longstanding partnership between Harvard and the Gates Foundation and reflects a shared commitment to building sustainable institutional capacity for health systems strengthening in India.
