The CIVICUS `Enabling Environment Index’ (EEI) is the first rigorous attempt to measure and compare the conditions that affect the potential of citizens to participate in civil society and ranks the governance, socio-cultural and socio-economic environments for civil society in 109 countries. While recent years have seen popular uprisings from the Arab Spring to the Occupy Wall Street movement, there have also been many crackdowns on the ability of citizens to mobilise. This tool is intended to help understand the conditions facing civil society in different parts of the world. It also helps identify countries where special attention needs to be paid to strengthening civil society by the international community. Angola, Ethiopia, Zimbabwe and the Democratic Republic of Congo rank among the 10 lowest countries on the Index.
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When South Korean director Kim Tae-yun said he wanted to make a film about workers who came down with leukemia and other rare diseases during the time they worked at Samsung Electronics Co. factories, just about everyone told him he would struggle to secure financial backing. Two years later, the film has premiered at the ongoing Busan International Film Festival‒in part thanks to crowd-sourced funds from nearly 7,000 individuals who paid for more than a quarter of the billion-won ($932,700) budget. Close to half was self-funded and the rest has been made as IOUs. It marks a rare coup for Korean cinema, where independent producers struggle to secure funding without support from major film studios. Critics say close family and business ties between major movie companies and the nation’s biggest corporations prevent films with negative portrayals of those conglomerates from being made.
The book Global Health Versus Private Profit focuses on the changes taking place in global health care systems. It presents evidence on how market-style reforms result in health care systems that are more unequal, more costly, more fragmented and less accountable – but which offer more profits to the private sector. The book offers an analysis of the “menu” of market-style reforms to health care systems that have been rolled out in country after country, despite the absence of evidence for their effectiveness, and ignoring the evidence of harm that is being done. These include the emphasis on competition rather than planning and cooperation, the splitting of health care systems into purchasers and providers, privatisation in various guises – including buying in services from the private sector that were previously delivered by public sector providers – the imposition of user fees, and the focus on health insurance and managed care in place of social provision and universal coverage. Many of these policies are being implemented in rich countries and poor alike, but they are having the most devastating impact on the poorest. They are argued to sap vital resources, dislocate and fragment systems, prevent them from responding to health needs, and obstruct the development of planning. My book argues that these so called “reforms” are driven not by evidence, but by ideology – but that behind the ideology is a massive material factor: the insatiable pressure from the private sector which is desperate to recapture a much larger share of the massive $5 trillion-plus global health care industry, much of which only exists because of public funding. The concluding chapter argues “It doesn’t have to be this way” and brings together a lot of different ideas, emphasising that the policies we are opposing are not inevitable products or even a rational response to the current situation, but choices that have been deliberately made by politicians working to a neoliberal agenda. They can be rejected and defeated by mass political action.
The crisis of capital, the rise of the Occupy movement and the crash of Southern Europe have brought the problem of income inequality into mainstream consciousness in the West for the first time in many decades. The video featured in this article points out that the richest 300 people on earth have more wealth than the poorest 3bn - almost half the world's population. In truth the situation is even worse: the richest 200 people have about $2.7 trillion, which is more than the poorest 3.5bn people, who have only $2.2 trillion combined. The video shows how this widening disparity operates between countries. It argues that the gap is growing in part because of neoliberal economic policies that liberalise markets, opening them to multinational corporations with a serious cost to poor countries of around $500bn per year in GDP. The video aims to help people to visualise this flow, and to show how it pumps up the Global North at devastating expense to the Global South.
This video covers the one day meeting held by the ECSA Health Community on global health diplomacy prior to the ECSA HC best practices forum.
This is an audio-library established by African women to share their stories and knowledge with their sisters across the continent, and with all listeners wherever they are. The collection celebrates the art and power of storytelling, and the creativity of African women, their achievements in arts, culture and media. The current weekly on-line release of new interviews forms a foundation for audio-visual training and creative media projects with women in the Zambezi region in 2014. The doors of this internet-archive are always open for listeners and for storytellers, who wish to contribute their stories and responses to the collection. In October, “Ibhayisikopo Film Project” and “radio continental drift” will join forces for a women-driven film- and media project. We want to train young women in Bulawayo as trainers in film-production and creative media. The facilitators are inviting listeners, artists and storytellers to build the sound-library of storytelling by contribute local recordings to the All Africa Sound Map and place African arts and culture on the global map.
This Primer contains tools and resources to help navigate the medical research and development (R&D) paradigm. The Primer provides information on discovery research; translational research; clinical research; regulatory application and approval; and non-profit actors and their roles in the R&D process.
The Global Health Primer connects the innovators that drive research and development for new drugs, vaccines and diagnostics to the neglected diseases where innovation is desperately needed. It provides a source of compiled and synthesised information for 25 neglected diseases of the developing world and the drugs, vaccines, and diagnostics in use or in development for the management of these diseases. The Primer tracks and analyses progress in global health research and development, provides an evidence base to support decision making, policy change and action, and brings new innovators to the table to address the main medical needs of poor people.
In the context of severe health worker shortages in rural areas, this toolkit is intended to help health leaders find out what motivates health workers to accept posts in rural areas and to stay there. The toolkit builds on the World Health Organisation’s global policy recommendations for rural retention and is based on the discrete choice experiment, a powerful research method that identifies the trade-offs health professionals are willing to make between specific job characteristics and determines their preferences for various incentive packages, including the probability of accepting a post in a rural health facility. The toolkit guides human resources managers through a survey process to rapidly assess health professional students’ and health workers’ motivational preferences to accept a position and continue working in underserved facilities. It allows for rapid data-gathering and analysis, and the results can be used to create evidence-based incentive packages. It includes step-by-step instructions, sample formats, and examples that can easily be adapted to a specific country context, including survey planning, survey design, survey instrument development using a specialised software programme, survey administration, data analysis and interpretation, and how to present results to stakeholders.
Recent snapshot surveys of research institutions in the African and Asian regions have revealed some significant gaps in the contracting and contract management capacity of low- and middle-income country (LMIC) institutions in these regions. Many institutions had not previously considered research contracting to be a legal issue and reported having no specialist legal expertise, with the result that contractual terms and conditions were often poorly understood. Without adequate legal capacity, contract negotiations can lead to agreements which disadvantage the LMIC partner. This guidance booklet is aimed at optimising research institution building through better contracts and contracting in research partnerships. It highlights the key issues for consideration when entering into formalised research partnerships, and provides tools and resources for negotiating fairer research contracts. Better contract negotiation expertise in LMIC institutions will help improve the distribution of benefits of collaborative research, such as overhead costs, data ownership, institutional capacity in research management, technology transfer, and intellectual property rights.