Location: London, UK

Gita is working to create better health outcomes through systems innovation. She’s passionate about building a world where instead of people having to own fixing their own circumstances, we create conditions and systems that truly have people’s needs at heart and take action that leads to impact. Talk to me about: Well_Lab: burnout and wellbeing, Vaccine Data CoLab: increasing covid vaccine uptake, Cancer Fatigue CoLab: tackling health inequalities.

Gita has worked on everything from making people want things (advertising & marketing in the Philippines where she helped launch the cervical cancer vaccine when it first came to market and tripled vaccine uptake in a year) to making things people want (fundraising and product innovation at the British Red Cross and Action for Children where she worked on creating new ways for people to support good causes). She’s now focused on making systems respond to people’s needs (like building precision public health systems to increase Covid-19 vaccine uptake through geospatial data and insights).

Gita is an experienced leader in innovation, fundraising and marketing with over 15 years' experience in the commercial and non-profit sector in Asia and Europe. She is originally from the Philippines and is currently based in London with her young family. Fun fact: over the pandemic on maternity leave she published an illustrated children’s book, Q is for Quarantine, to help future generations learn from the pandemic and raise money for frontliners.

Questions Gita is exploring in their work right now:

• How can we build fairer and more equitable health outcomes that aren’t determined by where you live in the world?
• How do we change money so it changes the world? (talk to me about incentives, systems and harnessing the decision making power of money and markets)
• How do we learn from and amplify low-cost frugal innovation from the Global South?