Elias Asfaw Zegeye

About Elias

I’m a health economist with a PhD in Health Economics and over 17 years of experience generating and applying economic evidence to strengthen health systems across Africa. My work sits at the intersection of health financing, economic evaluation, and health technology assessment (HTA) — helping governments and institutions make transparent, evidence-informed decisions about how to invest limited health resources.

I worked as a health economist (technical advisor, consultant) with the African Union/Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC), where I spearheaded the establishment of the Health Economics Unit. My work there spans resource optimization and priority-setting in public health emergency management, investment case development, evidence synthesis for policy decision-making, and HTA — including co-leading a cost-effectiveness study of COVID-19 vaccination programmes across 27 African countries, published in BMC Medicine.

Over the course of my career, I have led economic evaluations, discrete choice experiments, and macroeconomic modelling on diagnostics, vaccines, HIV/PMTCT, nutrition, and primary health care, with field research spanning Ethiopia, Kenya, Sudan, Uganda, Senegal, Botswana, and South Africa. I currently serve as a Research Fellow at the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s Economics Department and HEARD Division, where I supervise Master’s and PhD students in health economics.

My work has informed policy for the African Union, United Nations agencies, national ministries of health, and international partners, and appears in more than 20 peer-reviewed publications — including contributions to the Global Burden of Disease studies published in The Lancet.