About

Purpose

Market Bookshelf is a large and growing open-access collection of health market literature. It was developed to give the many different market players across the global health community easier access to the analyses, reports, guidance and tools created to understand and participate in different health markets. The up-to-date collection offers documents from key sources as well as unpublished sources, easily searchable and instantly downloadable.

Market Bookshelf was developed by a group of market specialists to respond to an unmet need. These specialists from across the donor, private sector and civil society community are part of global efforts to improve access to essential health products in underserved populations by investing in markets. They knew that practitioners from many global health organizations were contributing to knowledge development in the field of market dynamics, studying the interrelation of market actors, structures and financing on market and health outcomes. They also knew that what was missing was the dissemination and sharing of this knowledge in one, easy-to-navigate place. They wanted to create a place to share and find this knowledge and that led to the launch of Market Bookshelf.

Scope & Content

Market Bookshelf includes information to help market players across the global health community make decisions about participating in different health markets and learn from the successes and challenges of past market developments and interventions. It covers a broad range of health areas, including malaria, HIV/AIDS, nutrition, contraception, neonatal and child health, maternal health, tuberculosis & other communicable diseases, immunization and non-communicable disease. It includes documentation of specific approaches and country-experiences, as well as global analyses that provide guidance, lessons learned and best practices.

A qualified team of market specialists and administrators manage the collection’s content by labeling and uploading items so they can be filtered by different market players, and by soliciting submissions.

Size & Coverage

Market Bookshelf was launched in May 2017. The collection uniquely compiles market, scientific, technical and programmatic published sources, as well as grey literature reports, tool kits, analytic tools and other unpublished documentation in one location, under one search engine. While it is managed to ensure the regular inclusion of updated sources from key collections, its continued growth depends on user contributions, especially of unpublished documents. Please see “Submit” if you are interested in contributing.

Content Areas

Understanding markets is fundamental to identifying needs, gaps and opportunities for improving access to medicines, diagnostics, devices and other health technologies. In recent years, there has been growing and dedicated interest and investment across the global health community in studying markets to better inform investments and programming. With this, has come a growth in the lexicon and healthy discussion around terminology. Recognizing that there is variation in preferred terminology, we have determined to use three terms to define key market topic areas: market analysis, market intervention, and cross-cutting. Here is a bit more explanation of what each of these areas covers:

Market Analysis

If you search under market analysis, you will find documents and tools to better understand global health markets and challenges, at detailed levels for individual countries and health areas. These analyses will to help to inform decisions about market participation and development as well as potential need for market interventions. Documents included under this topic analyze the market from different supply and demand angles (think 5As “Affordability, Availability, Assured Quality, Appropriate Design, and Awareness”). You will currently find here market assessments (market size, market share, market volume, price, availability, etc.), market segmentations, landscape analyses, business cases, price analyses, etc. As Market Bookshelf grows, this section will come to cover other insight areas, such as product registration, quality assessments, policy and regulation analyses, EML and guideline inclusion, etc.

Market Intervention

If you search under market interventions, you will find documents and tools about actual market intervention experiences, best practices, and lessons learned. Interventions may be specific descriptions of experiences in pooled procurement, product development partnerships, channel subsidy, prize mechanisms, advance market commitment, volume guarantees, etc., or they may be combined lessons learned and best practices.

Cross-cutting

If you search under cross-cutting, you will find documents and tools that combine market analysis work with market intervention decisions. Sub-topics include total market approach and market shaping.

Filters

Points of explanation regarding select search filters:

Authors

Documents are tagged for all the authors identified in the document.

Geographies

Are structured utilizing the World Bank classification system. The global designation is used if the document covers multiple regions.  In general, many of these documents focus on multiple countries.

The drop-down filters do not offer individual countries.  If you wish to search for documents regarding a particular country, enter the country name in the free search box, and also select the applicable region to tailor your results.

Health areas

Are organized primarily by disease state or wellness focus, with a separate designation of ”health area agnostic” for documents which are focused on analyses that are cross-cutting and can be applied to different health areas without being specific to any single area.  For example, documents about health financing, delivery models, censuses of private sector providers, and general perspectives or market theory would all be indexed as ‘agnostic’.   Documents which address more than one health area, i.e. maternal health and also child/neonatal health or TB and HIV (co-infection) are indexed to both health areas.

Type of Document

Documents are tagged as either peer-reviewed article, other published literature, analytical tool or grey literature. Peer-reviewed article were published by a peer-reviewed journal. Other published literature are books, literature and other resources published by a commercial publisher. The analytical tools category includes resources such as guides to forecasting, conducting market and business assessments, planning guides and other decision-making tools along with user support material.    Grey literature includes reports, toolkits, presentations and other resources not published by commercial publishers.

Content Areas

See description above.

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