Civil society groups have expressed disappointment with the number of "industry groupings" that have "incorrectly gained NGO status" with the World Health Organization (WHO). There are 187 organizations or networks recognized as NGOs in official relations with the WHO. According to the International Baby Food Action Network (IBFAN), a new entrant into this WHO list of NGOs, industry groups which have been recognized as NGOs by WHO include Croplife International (representing Monsanto, Syngenta, Bayer, CropScience, Dow Agrosciences, DuPont and other companies promoting GMO technologies ) the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufactures and Associations, International Life Sciences Institute (representing Nestle, Coca Cola, Kellogg, Pepsi, Monsanto, Ajinomoto, Danone, General Mills and others) and the Industry Council for Development (representing Nestle, Mars, Unilever and Ajinomoto). "All are guided by market profit-making logic (whose primary interest clashes with that of WHO). Their inclusion goes against WHO's current NGO policy," said a statement issued by IBFAN.
Governance and participation in health
Bringing Justice to Health profiles 11 legal empowerment projects based in Indonesia, Kenya, Macedonia, Russia, South Africa, and Uganda. These projects were selected because they show the range of approaches to legal empowerment that they support in their broader effort to promote health-related human rights interventions. The report tells the personal stories of people around the world - such as sex workers, people who use drugs, palliative care patients, people affected by HIV, and Roma - for whom human rights violations are part of everyday life. Sexual violence, discrimination in housing, unwarranted dismissal from employment, unfair evictions, denial of child support, and police harassment are only a few such violations. The report shows how the non-governmental organisations (NGOs) that founded projects to address these issues set about resolving problems in a way that is designed to empower those who are often least able to exercise their rights.
The incidence of prostate cancer in Uganda is one of the highest recorded in Africa. Prostate cancer is the most common cancer among men in Uganda. This study assessed the current knowledge, attitudes and practices of adult Ugandan men regarding prostate cancer through a descriptive cross-sectional study using interviewer administered questionnaires and focus group discussions among 545 adult men aged 18–71 years, residing in Kampala, the capital of Uganda. The majority of the respondents had heard about prostate cancer but 46% had not. The commonest source of information about prostate cancer was the mass media. Only 13% of the respondents obtained information about prostate cancer from a health worker. Respondents confused prostate cancer with gonorrhea and had various misconceptions about its causes. Only 10% of the respondents had good knowledge of the symptoms of prostate cancer.
In Zambia, as in other low-income countries, maternal health indicators have remained stubbornly resistant to improvement. This intervention involved revitalizing Safe Motherhood Action Groups to raise awareness of the need to prepare for pregnancy complications and delivery. The main aim was to improve both understanding of maternal health and access to maternal health-care services. The approach was predicated on the assumption that women require not only knowledge about when they should seek skilled help but also their husbands’ approval for care seeking, which can be encouraged by community leaders. The authors adopted a quasi-experimental approach to evaluating the effect of a complex community-based intervention that was devised to reduce barriers to the use of maternal health-care services and to increase deliveries involving a skilled birth attendant. The intervention was novel because it involved the whole community and emphasized social approval and its ability to bring about changes in behaviour. The intervention was associated with significant improvements in women’s knowledge of when they should receive antenatal care and of obstetric dangers signs, in the use of emergency transport, in deliveries involving a skilled birth attendant and in the use of modern contraception. However, the increase in the proportion of women who received four or more antenatal care visits and in those who received postnatal care within 6 days was not significant.
134th session of the WHO's Executive Board 20-25 January 2014. The watching team in association with a number of PHM affiliate networks have published an 'Open Letter' to the delegates of the members of the Executive Board. The commentary includes analysis and comments on each of the items on the meeting's agenda.
A group of United Nations Special Rapporteurs today urged the Government of Kenya to reject legislation that would impose severe restrictions on civil society. “The Bill is an evidence of a growing trend in Africa and elsewhere, whereby governments are trying to exert more control over independent groups using so-called ‘NGO laws,’” the human rights experts warned. The Bill, which was presented to Parliament on 30 October, would amend Kenya’s Public Benefit Organization Act of 2012 and grant the Government sweeping powers to deny registration for such organizations, including non government organisations. It would also cap foreign funding at 15% of their total budgets and channel all their funding through a government body, rather than going directly to beneficiary organizations.
The spread and perpetuation of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in South Africa has hindered the country’s social and economic growth after apartheid. This paper documents experiences of interactions with the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), an organization which has taken a multidimensional approach in order to educate people about HIV/AIDS and to provide access to medicines. It reports how TAC has used both traditional and non-traditional methods of advocacy to combat the epidemic and equate access to health care to a social justice issue by empowering marginalized communities. The author uses three dimensions of lawyering and equates TAC to a single cause lawyer, signifying that multi-dimensional activism is not limited to individuals, but can also be applied at the firm level. The three dimensions include: (a) advocacy through litigation, (b) advocacy in stimulating progressive change, and (c) advocacy as a pedagogic process. He suggests that TAC’s multi-dimensional approach and its inherent practice of the three dimensions has contributed to its success and may be useful for other processes.
The field of transparency is packed with vocabulary that suggests opposition or conflict, with labels that imply, somehow, that the watchers are above the watched, like white knights fighting the dark forces of development aid, the corrupt and incompetent. However collaboration between watched and watchers may also offers a better chance of generating positive change, by understanding the political context of the activities being monitored, targeting the right people, in a non-threatening way, offering solutions as much as identifying problems. In other words, being a successful ‘watchdog’ is argued to be all about knowing how to approach different people in different circumstances to achieve mutually beneficial goals. This article explores how to build the demand side of aid transparency. It raises that beyond accessing relevant, timely and accurate data, is to learn to make use of it in a strategic way, with a constructive mind, taking into consideration local political dynamics, and the reality and psychology of the people whose performance one aims to monitor and improve.
Talking to French magazine Esprit, theorist Achille Mbembe discusses a postcolonial thinking that has developed in a transnational, eclectic vein, enabling a specific take on globalization. He outlines three cardinal moments in the development of postcolonial thought. The first, of anti-colonial struggles, included the self-reflection by people of their colonization and debates on the relationship between class and race as factors. The discourse centred on the politics of autonomy, to acquire citizen status and, thereby, to participate in the universal. The second moment, around the 1980s, he outlines as the moment of "high theory", with new thinking on knowledge about modernity. This understood the colonial project beyond its military-economic system, to one that was underpinned by a discursive infrastructure and a whole apparatus of knowledge the violence of which was as much epistemic as it was physical. The second post colopnial discourse sought to recover the voices and capabilities of decolonization's rejects (peasants, women, underprivileged people) and to better understand why the anti-colonial struggle led not to a radical transformation of society. Mbembe argues also argues that it sought to expose the procedures by which individuals are subjugated to categories of race and class that block access to the status of subject in history. In the third moment, Mbembe argues that globalisation has, as for colonial capitalism, subjugated living spheres to economic appropriation, and that the "colony" was in fact a laboratory for the wider authoritarian destiny of today’s globalisation. He proposes that in this context the reinvention of politics in postcolonial conditions first requires people to reinvent their place in history, not in a logic of repeating the same violence as vengeance, but in a demand for a justice that supports an "ascent in humanity“.
Abahlali baseMjondolo formed in 2005 has more than 12,000 members in more than 60 shack settlements. The organisation campaigns against evictions, and for public housing: struggling for a world in which human dignity comes before private profit, and land, cities, wealth and power are shared fairly. The article by the founder of Abahlali baseMjondolo expresses people's frustration with lack of delivery on rights to free housing, free education and free healthcare in urban South Africa, and the consequent resolve to take direct action to move rights from paper to reality, from abstract to concrete. While they acknowledge that this brings risk to their members, the author raises frustration with political and civil society processes, they also argue that they no choice but to take their own place in the cities and in the political life of the country.