The United Nations Global Strategy for Women's and Children's Health, together with the African Union’s commitment to deliver a coordinated campaign to improving maternal, child and newborn health and the G8’s commitment of US$5 billion, form part of a global strategy to save 16 million mothers and children by 2015. The strategy, according to this article, aims to integrate service delivery and funding platforms, involving a wide range of stakeholders, research and innovation, and track progress through an accountability framework. Planned outcomes include: 43 million new users having access to comprehensive family planning and 19 million more women giving birth attended by a skilled health worker with access to necessary infrastructure, drugs, equipment and regulations. The strategy is designed to ensure that 2.2 million additional neonatal infections are treated, 21.9 million additional infants are breastfed, 15.2 million more children are fully immunised in the first year of life and that 117 million more children aged less than five years receive vitamin A supplements. To deliver these interventions, 85,000 more health facilities and up to 3.5 million additional health workers are needed.
Values, Policies and Rights
According to this article, one aspect of the efforts of global capital to shape health policy in developing countries is the practice of so-called ‘independent’ think tanks, which seek to put into the public domain seemingly dispassionate opinion pieces on public policy, but which are openly oriented to promoting free market policy at the expense of public benefit. These think tanks propose that only free market liberalisation can solve problems related to food security, housing and health, but offer limited empirical evidence for this. The role of large corporate funding in their work is obscured. The article presents one example, the London-based International Policy Network, which is argued to promote private healthcare by arguing that human rights are not indivisible and inalienable, and by dismissing the validity of social and economic rights, particularly the right to health.
The 52nd East, Central and Southern African (ECSA) Health Ministers Conference was held in Zimbabwe from 25-29 October 2010, with the theme ‘Moving from Knowledge to Action: Harnessing Evidence to Transform Healthcare’. A number of resolutions were passed, calling for governments to promote evidence-based policy making, engage with the international community/global movement towards achieving universal health coverage, develop training programmes and monitoring mechanisms for improved maternal child health and reproductive health/family planning, establish and/or strengthen a national gender commission for dealing with gender-based violence and child sexual abuse, develop and monitor strategies for retaining health workers in the region and support strategic leadership in global health diplomacy. Further resolutions call for ECSA countries to prioritise nutrition interventions, strengthen monitoring and evaluation systems, strengthen the response to multi-drug resistant and extremely drug resistant tuberculosis, and strengthen partnerships for health by ensure that partner involvement in health programmes is aligned and harmonised with national health policies, plans and priorities. The countries should develop mechanisms for tracking health care investment and evaluating the outcomes of partnerships.
According to this report, forcing 'development' or 'progress' on indigenous people does not make them happier or healthier. The authors argue that indigenous peoples' well-being is primarily affected by whether their land rights are respected. Where this is not the case, and where indigenous people are not given a role in guiding development actions, they suffer poorer health outcomes, with increased rates of obesity and malnutrition, drug addiction, alcoholism, and with a change to Western diets, diabetes. The report links identity, freedom and mental health and argues that mental health problems, notably suicide, increase dramatically when a group’s identity and freedom is taken away.
In response to criticism of ethical review of a South African clinical trial, this study contrasts aspects of the United States (US) Common Rule with South African research ethics requirements. In the US the Common Rule does not apply to all health research and allows many exemptions from ethics review and waivers of informed consent. The study found that, at a structural level, research ethics review in South Africa is in many cases equivalent to the US institutional review board (IRB) and Office for Human Research Protections (OHRP) oversight system, is wider reaching, and has no exclusions.
This statement was released by the People’s Health Movement (PHM) in response to the Global Symposium on Health Systems Research, held from 16-29 November 2010 in Montreux, Switzerland. It raises a number of issues and suggestions for the future. It identifies some areas of relative neglect that may be rectified in the next Symposium, such as: the role of the health system in promoting primary health care, including the involvement of communities and intersectoral action; the place of people and participatory research in the field of health systems research; the challenge of balancing equity with universal coverage; and the roles of and interrelationship between public financing and insurance. PHM detects a tacit approval for the expansion of private financing and insurance models, which they consider problematic. While the importance of political and ideological factors were mentioned several times, PHM believes that more discussion could be had to discuss and determine the political, normative and ideological views of the community of health systems researchers. Health systems policy should be informed by research, but it needs to be shaped by normative principles and values first. At the Symposium, PHM notes that there was inadequate discussion about the way the HSR is shaped by university/academic context and the publishing industry and no discussion about the political economy of HSR and the biases in the research agenda that exist. Finally, PHM urges leaders and civil society not to tolerate the ‘myth of scarce resources’, and instead insist on equal focus and emphasis on the structural and macro-economic context of health systems.
On the basis of an analysis of popular and medical texts which address a debate over the ethics of clinical drug trials designed mainly for sub-Saharan Africa, this paper argues that the international public health discourse about infant HIV infection in Africa reflects and legitimates a anti-reproductive justice ideology. The author argues that the texts most commonly advance the view that biomedicine, funded from outside Africa with medicines from outside the continent, is the magic bullet that addresses mother and child HIV, avoiding issues of domestic advance in reproductive and sexual rights. This dominant focus is argued to give greater control over HIV to biomedical perspectives and to strengthen right-wing movements against advances in reproductive rights.
The goal of this methodology is to assist in the creation of valid, useful and ultimately meaningful human rights impact assessments. This followed the United Nation’s Special Representative on Human Rights and Business Professor John Ruggie's presentation to the Human Rights Council with a framework for delegating human rights and responsibilities between governments and companies. The process of creating and using HRIA is still in its early phases. Their relevance will depend on a continuing improvement of method, capacity and result which can only be accomplished through the sharing of experience and information between companies and assessors. The methodology looks at HRIA assessment sources, goals, and types. It covers basic concepts and looks provides five steps for implementation: gather project contexts and company information; drawing up a preliminary list of impacted rights; drawing up a preliminary list of impacted right holders; special topics; and inquiry guided by topic catalogue. The methodology offers recommendations for policies, procedures, structures and action. It also provides an appendix of other tools and selected best practices.
Data presented at the United Nations Summit in September in New York has revealed that many countries are unlikely to achieve all the health targets of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015. The simultaneous and interrelated challenges of poverty, health, food security, energy, the global economic crisis and climate change should be viewed by the global community as a unique opportunity to develop innovative approaches to achieve sustainable growth without compromising health equity. One such innovative approach is the concept of working across many sectors to improve governance for health and well-being. The 2010 Adelaide Statement on Health draws on the increasing body of knowledge on “joined-up” government to propose a new way for governments to engage multiple sectors in the joint goal of improving health and well-being. The article calls for an accountability mechanism between governments and their citizens, to ensure that global commitments on health are honoured. The shortfalls in progress towards the MDGs have occurred not because they are unreachable, it argues, but rather due to unmet commitments, inadequate resources, lack of focus and insufficient interest in sustainable development.
For the empowerment of women to make a real difference in the promotion of peace, the discussion needs to shift from one of competing forces to one of cooperation and collaboration, according to this article. Feminist scholars argue that both men and women possess characteristics that are considered, for lack of more refined language, masculine as well as feminine. The difference lies in the way we are socialised. We grow up being taught to behave in a particular way due to what society perceives gender differences to mean and to require. Social norms compel us to reinforce these perceptions and expectations, and then to undermine them when we use those very perceptions and expectations to blame one gender for being collaborative rather than competitive, accommodating rather than uncompromising, submissive rather than aggressive, gentle rather than violent. This article argues that it is in peace education and peace studies that a more meaningful perspective on gender equality has been developed. Such a perspective might enable leaders to promote uMunthu (belief that all humans are connected and therefore deserve respect), peace and social justice at the local and global level, making them much more relevant to the majority of people around the world.