Virgem Margarida (Virgin Margarida) is a new feature film, set in 1975. The revolutionary government wants to eradicate all the traces of colonialism, including commercial sex work. All the sex workers are taken to the most isolated forest in the country where they are to be reeducated and transformed into new women, under the watch of guerrilla women fighters. Amongst the 500 women is 14-year-old Margarida, who was in town to buy her bridal trousseau. Because she doesn't have her ID documents, she is taken by mistake. In the reeducation center, the revelation that Margarida is a virgin changes everything. The commercial sex workers start to worship her like a saint. Shot in Azevedo’s signature style, the film is a combination of a documentary/scripted fiction style, intended to reflect the varied real-life stories in Mozambique, his home country.
Useful Resources
The Academy of Women’s Health has launched a new regular column on its website that provides timely updates on diseases and conditions that are prevalent among women to help physicians and other healthcare providers optimise patient outcomes. The column provides opinions from eminent researchers and clinicians and presents the most up-to-date management strategies.
International Human Rights Funders Group and the Foundation Center have launched the first-ever visualization tool of the contemporary scope and landscape of global human rights grantmaking. The tool is designed to enable both grantmakers and grantseekers to search for human rights funders by several key criteria: areas of rights funding, activities supported and geographic focus. The map will be the first tool to be released as part of the centre’s Advancing Human Rights: Knowledge Tools for Funders initiative and will enable funders to search for grants by rights issue, population served, and location of grantee. To access the map, a user account must be created.
A new Governance Handbook issued by the Global Fund describes the Fund's various structures and governance processes. The handbook was conceived primarily as an operations guide for members of the Global Fund Board and their delegations, but it has also been made public. Separate sections of the handbook are devoted to topics such as the history of the Global Fund, the roles of the Board and its committees, and the current funding model and how it may evolve.
A new online collection of research, documentation and articles on Health Ethics has been launched by Globethics.net in its Global Digital Library on Ethics (GlobeEthicsLib). Initially including more than 500 documents, the collection is a unique online resource covering topics related to health ethics such as pharmaceuticals, health economics, health politics, access to medical care, environmental issues and bioethics. The collection is available to participants who register with Globethics.net.
More than 120 million women worldwide want to prevent pregnancy, but they and their partners are not using contraception. The aim of this World Health Organisation (WHO) handbook is to help these people by enabling health care providers to give better care in this regard. According to WHO, reasons for the unmet need for family planning are many: services and supplies are unavailable; fear of social disapproval or partner’s opposition; worries of side effects and health concerns; and lack of knowledge. The handbook highlights that family planning methods can be effective when properly provided, and when providers allow clients to choose their own contraceptive method and provide them with support and quality information. Many continuing clients need little support, and for them convenient access is key. The handbook contains specific guidance on twenty family planning methods and addresses many of providers’ different needs, from correcting misunderstandings to managing side effects. It also covers related health issues that may arise in the context of family planning.
The new interface for the World Health Organisation’s Global Price Reporting Mechanism (GPRM) is now available online. This improved interface enables users to search for the price and volumes sold of HIV medicines (all, or selected formulations), in countries, regions, by income category, by Human Development Index category, by manufacturer and by type of manufacturer (generic or innovator). New data has been included for trends of price and volumes sold. All data is quality controlled, as duplicates have been removed, suspicious data are quarantined and queried before they are uploaded. Data for 2011 and 2012 are now available from GPRM in the public domain as they are uploaded for the first time.
This Reader aims to support the development of the field of health policy and systems research (HPSR), particularly in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). It provides a particular focus on methodological issues for primary empirical health policy and systems research. More specifically, it aims to support the practice of, and training in, HPSR by: encouraging researchers to value a multidisciplinary approach, recognising its importance in addressing the complexity of health policy and systems challenges; stimulating wider discussion about the field and relevant research questions; demonstrating the breadth of the field in terms of study approaches, disciplinary perspectives, analytical approaches and methods; and highlighting newer or relatively little-used methods and approaches that could be further developed. The Reader is mainly for use by researchers and health system managers, teachers and facilitators involved in HPSR training, and students, from any discipline or background, who are new to the field of HPSR.
The official website for the European Union-funded Consortium for Health Policy and Systems Analysis in Africa (CHEPSAA) has just been launched. CHEPSAA is working with universities in Africa and Europe to strengthen teaching, research and policy networking activities for the rapidly emerging field of health policy and systems research and analysis (HPSR+A). CHEPSAA’s aim is to build the field of HPSA through: assessing the capacity development needs of the African members and national policy networks; supporting the development of African researchers and educators; strengthening the development of HPSA courses; strengthening networking among the health policy and systems education, research and policy communities; and strengthening the process of getting research into policy and practice. The new website gathers HPSR+A resources, pooling information from sources far wider than CHEPSAA for teachers, researchers, students, policy-makers and decision-makers. The website contains a number of resources: classic texts, recommended reading, teaching materials, links to core HPSA journals and material by CHEPSAA.
The Protocol on the Rights of Women in Africa is renowned for its strong and comprehensive provisions on women’s rights. For the first time in international law, it explicitly sets forth the reproductive right of women to medical abortion when pregnancy results from rape or incest or when the continuation of pregnancy endangers the health or life of the mother. This Guide provides step-by-step guidance for using the Protocol at local, national, and regional levels. It explains how to bring women’s rights abuses that violate the Protocol before domestic courts and regional justice mechanisms like the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights and analyses key cases related to women’s rights decided by the African Commission. The Guide also provides activists with more general strategies for the popularisation and domestication of the Protocol to protect the rights of African women and girls and ensure they have complete access to justice.