Latest Equinet Updates

EQUINET conferences have provided an opportunity for different communities and areas of focus to interact, and have given guidance to our work, organisation and networking on health equity in East and Southern Africa. In 2022 EQUINET held a regional conference. Challenging a neoliberal mantra that there are no alternatives to policies that create social deficits and injustice, and sharing the ideas and creativity of our region, the 2022 conference shared and discussed experiences, evidence, analysis, successes and struggles from local to regional level and engagement globally to advance health and wellbeing in East and Southern Africa. Through the exchanges, delegates framed propositions to advance health equity and social justice in our region. The EQUINET Conference was held online in three and a half days, each day a month apart, with each of the three full days covering one of the EQUINET strategic directions - Reclaiming the resources for Health, Reclaiming the state, and Reclaiming collective agency and solidarity in health - with a final half-day - Organising regionally for health equity - on how EQUINET organises and what it does to take the strategic directions forward. You can now watch the videos of the presentations on each of the 4 conference days, from opening speeches from diverse leaders in and beyond the region, EQUINET, regional and international presenters, musicians and artists, reports of discussions and finally a closing speech from WHO AFRO.

Work was implemented in 2022 in EQUINET to gather evidence on promising practice aimed at addressing urban health equity and wellbeing in east and southern Africa (ESA to contribute to learning within the ESA region and to share and exchange with other regions. This report presents the work carried out in the ESA region through a desk review of online documents and case studies from selected cities, of areas of promising practice. It shares insights and learning from the findings on practices that promote urban wellbeing and health equity. Collectively, the initiatives have yielded a range of outcomes and changes. In terms of processes for equity-oriented change in urban wellbeing, the report outlines a mix of interventions and tools that promote both participatory and recognitional equity as pivotal to change. Many of the insights generated relate to the design of initiatives and the efforts made to stimulate cross sectoral, multi-stakeholder inputs as a response to the multi-dimensional nature of the drivers of inequality and deprivation. The report notes, however, that initiatives need to connect beyond the local level if they are to have more impact on the structural dimensions of equity, and points to national level inputs that appear to be important to sustain and support such local level practice.

What does looking at the pandemic from a youth lens tell us about what we need to address now in our region? This brief focuses on this. EQUINET information sheets on COVID-19 summarise information from and provide links to official, scientific and other resources on east and southern Africa (ESA) covering selected themes related to equity in the pandemic. This brief covers: recent data on COVID-19 in ESA countries and in youth; youth health and wellbeing during the pandemic; services and responses to youth needs during the pandemic; youth led responses and initiatives and equity issues and actions exposed by the pandemic for young people.

This paper outlines performance on key dimensions of public sector health financing: the size of the funding ‘gap’ in relation to basic health service needs; population entitlements; and state duties to health care; with brief discussion on the negative implications for equity of meeting this gap through out of pocket spending and privatisation of health services. With tax revenues the most progressive source of health financing for universal health coverage, it examines the level, sources and drivers of lost tax revenue in ESA countries, and relates the public sector health system funding gap to the sources of lost tax revenue. The paper points to how the current global tax framework and its unfair allocation of taxing rights benefits high income countries to the significant detriment of low- and middle-income countries. Despite promises of reforms by some larger high income countries, those that have been proposed fail to address this tax injustice. This evidence indicates that it is possible to meet the health financing gap for public sector health systems in the region through adequate funding from progressive taxation. With the public health and economic implications of COVID-19 having drawn socio-political attention to the need for investment in public sector health systems, the authors argue that there is an opportunity for a more ambitious alliance between the health and finance sectors to demonstrate the public health value of addressing these critical tax losses to increase public revenues for health.