This short documentary by Ishaya Bako and Oliver Aleogena, and featuring Nobel Prize laureate Wole Soyinka, provides an insight into the Nigerian fuel subsidy. The film presents the social government spending from the subsidy and presents the reasons for its removal and how this has plunged many Nigerians into poverty.
Useful Resources
Global Health and Human Rights Database
Lawyers Collective and the O'Neill Institute
The Global Health and Human Rights Database is a free and fully searchable online database of more than 1000 judgments, constitutions and international instruments on the intersection between health and human rights.
HRH Global Resource Center eLearning Platform
Capacity plus provides free online courses to build the capacity of country-based users in critical skills. The courses include
• Designing Evidence-Based Incentives to Attract and Retain Health Workers
• An Introduction to Monitoring and Evaluation of HRH
• Foundations of Gender Equality in the Health Workforce, and
• iHRIS Administrator: Level 1
Universal health: From private coverage to public care
Municipal Services Project video, November 2013
The universal health coverage agenda is opening the door for privatization of public health systems in the global South. In India, insurance-based coverage has skewed public health priorities and starved primary care. This animation video calls on people everywhere to mobilize around public alternatives to achieve health for all. Spanish subtitles are available.
CIVICUS Enabling Environment Index, 2013
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.
Crowd-Sourced Film on Samsung Debuts
The Wall Street Journal-Asia, October 9, 2013
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.
Global Health Versus Private Profit
John Lister
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 truth about extreme global inequality
Jason Hickel, Aljazeera, 14 Apr 2013
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.
Conference in Global Health Diplomacy: The new realm in international relations- event video
ECSA Health Community, Arusha, August 2013
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.
The women sing at both sides of the Zambezi
Audio-library established by African women
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.