Call for applicants for the 2025 online training in Health Impact Assessment closing 5pm February 4 2025. EQUINET is through TARSC and in association with regional (SATUCC, Talk AB[M]R) ECSA Health Community and international partners (Nossal Institute of Global Health, C Dora) convening online training and mentored case work to build HIA capacities in ESA countries. The course will provide materials and interactive presentations on the policy and legal basis of HIA, the steps, methods, evidence, analysis in and reporting of an HIA, and the monitoring of recommendations. Trainees will plan and implement a mentored case study HIA in teams over the course period. The capacity building will be implemented in ten online (zoom) training sessions in four course blocks, staggered at intervals between April 28 and July 31 2025. After two or three online course sessions of 2 hours each in a block, there will be a month before the next block to give time for 2 online tutorials with mentors to guide teams to work at self-arranged times on the HIA steps covered in the training for their own case studies. There will be four course blocks in the period. Participants satisfactorily completing the course will receive a certificate of completion. This document outlines the information for applicants for the course.
Latest Equinet Updates
Climate justice and equity, is an urgent issue for communities, countries, and the region, and intersects with, impacts on and is intensified by other areas of inequality that the Regional Network for Equity in Health in east and southern Africa (EQUINET) is focused on. Given this, EQUINET is sharing knowledge, experiences and learning on health equity impacts of climate in webinars on various areas of health equity. The sixth webinar and this brief from it focuses on the interplay between land rights, climate agro-ecology, and pandemic risks. The webinar interrogated these relationships at the local, national and global levels and suggested actions to be taken to mitigate the impacts particularly on these drivers of health and well-being of people and natural resources.
EQUINET identifies health equity as being affected by conditions and actions across multiple thematic areas. It sought to understand the intersect between climate change and health equity through the outcomes of five webinars and two rapid reviews and an online review meeting organised to explore these intersects. The webinars and briefs focused on selected thematic areas EQUINET has identified as central to health equity in the region, including health rights, food systems, urban health, extractives and health, trade and health, primary health care and tax justice. This synthesis report presents a thematic analysis of the briefs from the webinars and rapid reviews (separately available on the EQUINET website), and from an online review meeting on the findings. It outlines how climate change is intersecting with the various dimensions of health equity, including social inequalities and vulnerabilities in health, and the approaches underway or proposed to address these impacts and to promote health equity in the face of climate change, including for future work in EQUINET. It is shared as an interim product that we will update following EQUINET’s ongoing work in 2025.
There are many examples of healthy, equitable, climate-adapted urban food and waste management practices underway in the east and southern Africa region. These practices integrate waste management, clean energy and green urban ecosystems. They demonstrate multi-sector, multi-actor collaborative planning, informed by disaggregated evidence of different forms, building coalitions that share goals, ideas and ownership, and bring diverse resources and skills to processes. They show how a holistic, circular economy links the 3Rs (reduce, recycle, reuse) to reclaim vacant land with waste dumps for gardens that enable urban agriculture; that use bio-waste for energy and that develop and use local technology innovations. These initiatives integrate equity, incomes and food security to bring sustainable benefit and improved health and nutrition for often marginalised groups. They integrate health and climate justice in reduced air and water pollution, reduce emissions from waste burning, reduce flooding from clogged drains, enrich soil through organic fertilisers, and climate proof infrastructures. In iterative steps, they assess, review and improve practice, and in so doing strengthen social respect for healthy ecosystems as a source of economic and social benefit and reduced ill health. An EQUINET community of practice on urban health proposed 10 areas of action for scaling up such practices. The recommendations to build, enable and amplify such practice are shown in the brief. In each there are examples of promising practice, guidance, methods, tools and experience to share, with hyperlinks to read further information on each example. Information is also given on where to submit your own examples, as the brief will be updated over time.
This brief provides a rapid review of literature and public evidence from various sources on the interface between financing climate justice, tax justice and health equity1. Prior EQUINET webinars on other areas of health equity raised growing concerns on the lack of delivery on commitments made for climate financing in the region. The brief thus complements the work done in previous EQUINET webinars on how climate justice interacts with different facets of health equity, available on the EQUINET website. All briefs from the webinars are being synthesised in a separate discussion document. This brief summarises key issues related to: climate financing in the region and the links to tax and economic justice and health equity; actions proposed to address these issues at local, national and regional level and in international/ global level processes; and issues for further research and discussion.
East and southern African (ESA) countries have achieved many gains in health, but also face many health challenges, including from commercial risks and the challenges of climate change. Poverty and inequality continues to affect opportunities to lead healthy lives. This context, the region’s policy commitment to primary health care and the need for action by many sectors to address the drivers of ill health calls for authorities, approaches and tools that more firmly lever evidence, and multi-sectoral action to protect and improve health. In the same way as environmental impact assessment was institutionalized in the ESA region to play a role in protecting ecosystems, health impact assessment similarly needs to be institutionalized to embed evidence and health promoting changes in wider activities, systems and policies that raise health risks. Policy leaders in Africa recognized this in the WHO AFRO Regional Multi-sectoral Strategy to promote health and well-being, 2023–2030, with a target by 2030 to have institutionalized and integrated health impact assessment .
Assessing the effect of policies, strategies, corporate and economic activities on health is a core capability to protect public health. Health impact assessment (HIA) helps to identify where changes to project design or operation provide health benefits and mitigate health risks, adding economic value and wellbeing. HIA is a structured process that informs decision makers about the potential effects of a project, programme, economic activity or policy on the health and well-being of populations. In 2023, EQUINET and partners initiated work to provide online training and mentored case study work to build HIA capacities in multi-actor teams in ESA countries. The course built understanding of the theoretical basis of HIA, and knowledge of the methods, evidence, analysis in an HIA, of reporting of and engagement on HIA, and implementation and monitoring of proposed actions. It provided mentored guidance of participant HIA practical work, using real HIA case studies. Towards the end of the course there was discussion on issues and strategies for scaling up and integrating HIA in key sectors and in public health law. This report summarises the proceedings and issues raised.
EQUINET has been using participatory action research (PAR) for several decades, reflecting the understanding that the voice, power and self-determination that is inherent for equity should also be integrated in the production of knowledge, and that knowledge and its generation and use is a deeply sociopolitical activity. While some thematic areas of work in EQUINET have applied PAR approaches, not all had, and steering committee (SC) members felt that it would be important to widen understanding of the methods to see how they could be integrated within different areas of work, as a cross cutting process. This online skills session was implemented in June 2024 to give colleagues involved in EQUINET work a brief introduction to PAR and how it can be used in EQUINET’s various thematic areas. The session aimed stimulate interest in and understanding of how PAR can deepen the different areas of research work on health equity. A video of presentations in the session is available at https://youtu.be/OR_lhxoSQuQ
This EQUINET regional meeting gathered people from institutions involved in the work on urban health and health impact assessment (HIA) and related expertise in May 2024 in Nairobi, Kenya, to address issues relating to scaling up promising, climate responsive practice to promote healthy urban food, waste and ecosystems in ESA. It built on work implemented in the region on urban health from 2020 and used a mix of presentation, discussion and participatory processes. The meeting reports on information shared on experience and evidence from both urban health work and HIA in ESA on the laws, policies, systems, features, measures and tools that positively impact on and make linkages across economic, social, health and ecosystem wellbeing, including to respond to climate change. Delegates identified implications for policy and practice at national, regional and global level and a theory of change, strategies and recommendations to advance, support and scale-up the promising policies, practices and tools identified in the meeting.
This desk review on the health implications of the implementation of the AfCFTA within the ESA region implemented by the Southern and Eastern African Trade Information and Negotiations Institute (SEATINI) outlines the health sector and health-related areas directly or indirectly covered by the ACTFA and the relevant subsidiary instruments. It presents information on these and the AfCTA provisions and their implications for trade liberalisation, which are largely consistent with those under World Trade Organization (WTO) agreements. The paper identifies the AfCTA’s positive and negative actual and potential health sector and health- related impacts, including for health equity. It does this in terms of the products that will be subject to liberalisation, including those with potential benefit for health such as local production of health technologies and pharmaceuticals, as well as those that may be harmful to health such as tobacco and genetically modified and ultra-processed foods. It also explores the health implications of the AfCFTA on financial flows and public revenue and on the movement of people, including health personnel. Given this analysis of impacts, measures are proposed that individual countries and the ESA region as a whole may take to protect health equity goals, including monitoring mechanisms to track and report on those impacts.