Swaziland's mayors are adopting a novel method in the fight against HIV/AIDS. They are reversing the usual top-down approach and are being led instead by their constituents, ordinary Swazis. "The voice of the people will determine how we will combat AIDS in the towns," explained chairman of the Ezulwini town board, Nokuthula Mthembu. The first woman to hold the top government post in her municipality, Mthembu is chair of the Executive Council of the Alliance of Mayors' Initiative for Community Action on AIDS at the Local Level (AMICAALL). "There has never been a project like this one," Mthembu told PlusNews. "But we absolutely must have an innovative approach to combat the deadly disease that is attacking our municipalities. We desperately need fresh ideas."
Governance and participation in health
The Global Initiative on AIDS, Inc. and the Global Initiative on AIDS in Africa is calling on African journalists, writers, physicians, scientists, researchers, health care providers, grassroots activists and citizens in general who are involved on every level of the struggle against HIV/AIDS in African and throughout the Diaspora to submit articles, issues, opinions, research findings, and news about HIV/AIDS related matters. GIAA will publish "The Voice of the People," An International Journal Chronicling the Battle Against HIV/AIDS from the Perspective of Africans, African-Americans, African-Carribeans and Africans Around the World. Anyone interested in submitting articles and/or contributing to this effort should contact Angele Kwemo or Patricia Okolo.
Narayan, Deepa and Patti Petesch, 2002. Voices of the Poor: From Many Lands. New York, N.Y: Published for the World Bank, Oxford University Press. "From Many Lands," the third and last volume of the Voices of the Poor series, presents 14 country case studies in Africa (Ghana, Malawi, Nigeria), South and East Asia (Bangladesh, India, Indonesia), Europe and Central Asia (Bosnia, Bulgaria, Kyrgyz Republic, Russia), and Latin America and the Caribbean (Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, Jamaica). Using participatory and qualitative research methods, the study presents the realities of poor people's lives directly through their own voices, with a concluding chapter on an empowering approach to development.
25 April 2002 | Geneva | To meet the 2010 target of cutting malaria deaths in half - agreed in Abuja by African leaders on this day two years ago - community mobilization is essential in controlling the disease and providing prompt access to treatment. Powerful new combination therapies, including the Chinese herb derivative artemisinin, are highly effective against malaria and the parasite does not easily develop resistance to them. New financial arrangements are needed so that developing countries can make use of these medicines, which are much more expensive than conventional, increasingly ineffective ones.
The Third Forum of the World Alliance of Cities against Poverty (WACAP) held in Huy, Belgium, from 10-12 April, provided an opportunity for representatives to develop partnerships. Participants from 96 countries shared experiences on how they are becoming increasingly involved in addressing the impact of HIV/AIDS, particularly on women. The Alliance of Mayors Initiative for Community Action on AIDS (AMICAALL), set up with support from UNAIDS to help translate the goals of the IPAA into concrete actions, is multisectoral and emphasises partnerships between local government, civil society, including the private sector and communities, mayors and municipal leaders in Africa. Through their strategy they are working through exiting cities' networks as well as with other partners and networks to ensure that HIV/AIDS is integrated into municipal agendas. For more information please contact Mina Mauerstein-Bail.
With the support of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Health Services Research (HSR) is planning a special issue focusing on the social determinants of health, to provide a forum for presenting the latest research and policy analysis to a broad audience of researchers, practitioners, and policymakers. There is ample evidence that most health policymakers, both at state and federal levels, do not understand how policy relating to non-medical determinants of health can be incorporated into health policy. Conversely, policymakers in such fields as education, transportation, or housing rarely see that there are major health implications to the choices that they make. Education is needed in both directions. Topics of interest include but are not limited to social inequalities in health by socioeconomic position, race/ethnicity, gender, etc.; the role of a broad range of psychosocial factors in health at the level of individuals, neighborhoods, and communities, and broader sociopolitical units; the interconnections and interactions between and among social and biological-chemical-physical determinants of health; and implications of social determinants of health for health care or health services research, practice, and policy. Jim House, Nicole Lurie, and Catherine McLaughlin will serve as co-editors of the special HSR issue. September 1, 2002 is the deadline for submission. The planned publication date is July 2003.
Claudio Schuftan
The People's Charter for Health (PCH), The PHM's manifesto, is one and a half years old. It has been disseminated quite widely world-wide.
2. The world has moved on since. But, clearly, for the worse in almost all fronts the PHM has strong feelings about. Most worrisome is the fact that most of the world's shifts for the worse have become so depressingly predictable, and nobody seems to be succeeding in doing much about them.
3. The PCH's 'Call for Action' predicted much of what we are witnessing; we were "on the dot". So, to continue to be "on the dot", we simply have to reassess where we are and what we have, and have not, achieved. Just to make yet further predictions of doom would be to utterly fail all that and those we stand for.
This desk review provides an update on practice and experiences of civil society participation in the development of Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs). It was commissioned by Department for International Development (DFID) and conducted from August–October 2001 by the Participation Group at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) in the UK.
Deepa Narayan, Robert Chambers, Meera K. Shah and Patti Petesch - 2001
This book is based on the realities of poor people. It draws upon research conducted in 1999 involving 20,000 poor women and men from 23 countries. Despite very different political, social and economic contexts, there are striking similarities in poor people's experiences. The common theme underlying poor people's experiences is one of powerlessness. Powerlessness consists of multiple and interlocking dimensions of illbeing or poverty. The organisation of this book roughly follows the 10 dimensions of powerlessness and illbeing that emerge from the study. The remainder of the book presents methodology and the challenges faced in conducting the study.
‘HEALTH FOR ALL IS POSSIBLE AND NECESSARY’
The participants of this Forum held in Porto Alegre – Brazil, January 29th and 30th, 2002, call on all the people of the world, who feel the imperative to build a fairer and more equitable societies to rally around this declaration to publicize it and to engage on sustained actions along its lines. We understand that this 2nd World Social Forum starts a new step on the fight for the universal respect of social rights, particularly the right to health since we understand health as the expression of the overall quality of life, and not only the issue of access to health services. We denounce to the world the devastating effects the macroeconomic adjustment policies and now the militarization of international relationships are having over the quality of people’s life. We affirm that these effects are not the neoliberal economic policies’ exceptional, accidental outcome, but the real essence of its logic that aims at maximizing profits, regardless of states’ aim at social welfare measures; these policies are dividing the world into a huge social apartheid where countries and regions are relegated to the condition of spectators of the immense accumulation of international capital; they invariably result in deep inequalities and a perpetuating social injustice. The rich ARE getting richer and the desperately poor poorer, more so women, children and the elderly. The poor of the world are left looking at the rich as ‘from the other side of the shopping mall windows’, searching for an elusive paradise which is denied to them by the economic order that socially segregates the world and ecologically disregards it.