NextBillion - A WDI Publication

Alex Losneanu is Innovation Director at Brink, the home of Behavioural Innovation. She pioneered Brink’s CoLab methodology, a systemic, multi-disciplinary way of working on problems too complex or too uncertain for single interventions. Alex leads its growing Better Futures CoLab platform, a portfolio of programmes tackling some of the hardest challenges in global health.

Her flagship programme, the Oxygen CoLab, has spent five years cracking open one of global health’s most stubborn problems: why medical oxygen remains out of reach for patients at the last mile. Under Alex’s leadership, the CoLab has funded R&D grants to leading manufacturers to meet UNICEF’s Target Product Profile for concentrators, invested in a portfolio of Oxygen-as-a-Service models across Kenya, Nigeria, Uganda, Tanzania and India, and co-authored research that is now shaping how donors, governments and global health partners think about procurement. The CoLab’s next chapter is focused on building local healthcare businesses (the ‘Missing Middle’ of medical oxygen delivery in Sub-Saharan Africa) that are commercially viable, locally owned, and built to last.

Alongside the Oxygen CoLab, Alex oversees programmes on equitable access to vaccines, cancer-related fatigue in marginalised communities, and livelihoods in Kenya’s informal sector. She also helped establish the Brink Foundation CIC, Brink’s philanthropic arm, which is reshaping how grant funding is designed and where it flows.

Alex came to global development from the commercial world, where she spent over a decade as a strategist launching new ventures across healthcare, energy, technology and defence. She brings a private-sector view of what it takes to make models commercially viable to governments and funders working on some of the hardest problems in global health.

She holds an MSc in Intercultural Communication for Business from the University of Warwick, but her real education has come from working alongside clinicians, entrepreneurs, policymakers and innovators across four continents.