When my comrades and I disrupted Minister of Health Manto Tshabalala-Msimang’s speech at the Health Systems Trust conference, a public health official taunted one of the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) members by saying: “How did you get HIV anyway?” We also received an angry letter from a man who feels our demand for treatment is unfair. This article is written for them. It is also written for people like Western Cape African National Congress health spokesperson, Cameron Dugmore, who called us bullies for disrupting the minister.
First, I apologise unconditionally to the minister for referring to her personal appearance during our disruption. Any reference to the personal appearance of an opponent to discredit them is wrong. It’s also wrong because it undermines the dignity of the protest of thousands of TAC volunteers and allows people who need to curry favour with officials a cover for their lack of courage and morality. It is also no excuse to say that I was angry, because a few minutes before my own anger against indifference became uncontrollable I had told a comrade whose mother had been hospitalised with a CD4 count of 54 and raging tuberculosis that she should use her anger to demonstrate peacefully. But there are many things I do not apologise for. I do not apologise for holding Tshabalala-Msimang and Minister of Trade and Industry Alec Erwin responsible for thousands of HIV/Aids deaths. Second, neither the TAC nor I will make any apology for making the minister of health, any politician or bureaucrat feel uncomfortable through a disruption of any meeting, office or event where they may find themselves. Hundreds of premature, painful, awkward, silent and screaming deaths of children, men and women daily are caused by the failure of the government to implement a comprehensive treatment and prevention plan for HIV/Aids.
To Dugmore and the other detractors of our campaign who call us bullies, let me ask: were you at the many lawful marches to Parliament to give memoranda to the minister and the president begging for HIV treatment? Perhaps you did not see our march of about 15 000 people on the South African Parliament asking the government to sign a treatment and prevention plan on February 14? What about our early pickets of Parliament, drug companies and the United States government? Civil disobedience is action of last resort for us, because exhaustive efforts at engagement have not worked. Let me ask further: did you attend any of more than 10 submissions to various parliamentary portfolio committees begging, cajoling, charming and arguing for HIV treatment? Did you attend any of more than 30 interfaith services held by the TAC and our allies across the country appealing to the conscience of the health minister and the government? Do you know that we tried quietly to persuade Dr Ayanda Ntsaluba, Dr Nono Simelela, Dr Essop Jassat, Dr Ismail Cachalia, Dr Saadiq Kariem, Dr Kammy Chetty, Dr Abe Nkomo and other doctors who are members of the ANC to ensure that the government change its policies or to let their scientific training, their Hippocratic oaths and their consciences allow them to speak the truth? Maybe you also tried to persuade them that real loyalty to the ANC and the ideals of the Freedom Charter required open criticism after numerous private pleas? Have you reminded the ministers of health and trade and industry that they are undermining the ANC’s traditions of freedom, equality, solidarity and dignity?
Do you remember that the health minister and her supporters in Cabinet really represent the anti-democratic traditions of the former Stalinist states that supported them? Perhaps one should expect people who denied the existence of the Gulag or applauded the invasion of Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland and East Germany by Soviet troops and called the latest Zimbabwean election legitimate to deny the existence of HIV/Aids and the efficacy of antiretrovirals? Did you attend hundreds of community meetings addressed by TAC volunteers across the country to educate ourselves and our people about HIV, prevention and treatment? Did you help late into the night, in support of the government, to develop a court case against the drug companies to reduce the prices of all medicines including HIV/Aids medicines? Do you remember how the health minister spurned the TAC after the case? Do you know the anguish of the person who made the poster that said: “Thabo your ideas are toxic”? Were you at the funeral of Queenie Qiza (one of the first TAC volunteers) or did you hear Christopher Moraka choke to death after appealing to Parliament to reduce the prices of medicines? Maybe, like me, you avoided the funeral of my cousin Farieda because I cannot face the pain of death? Did you feel as encouraged as we were by the Cabinet statement of April 17 2002? Are you as disappointed a year later that so little has been done? Were you there when we illegally imported a good quality generic anti-fungal drug (Fluconazole) and shamed drug company Pfizer for profiteering?
Maybe you followed the TAC/Congress of South African Trade Unions’s treatment congress where unemployed people, nurses, scientists, cleaners and trade unionists invited the government to develop a treatment plan? Do you remember our meeting with Deputy President Jacob Zuma that led to a promise that a treatment and prevention plan would be developed by the end of February 2003? Did you miss the word-games played by the government over negotiations at the National Economic and Development Labour Council (Nedlac)? Are you one of the people who phone Nedlac regularly to hear when the government will return to the negotiating table? Or, are you one of the people too busy taking care of someone dying but who have a little pride in your heart when an activist says to the president: “Comrade, you are not listening to our cries. You are denying the cause of our illness. You are not helping us get medicines.” After countless attempts at talking, public pressure and even a court case to prevent HIV infection from mother-to-child, the government allows the deaths to continue while it plays the caring, right-minded diplomat in Africa and the Middle East. Politeness disguises the moral and legal culpability of these politicians and officials. We believe that the personal crises faced by many of our families, friends, nurses, doctors, colleagues and their children should be turned into discomfort and a crisis for the politicians and bureaucrats who continue to deny our people medicine.
The fact that the health minister is obstructing the departments of health, finance, labour and the deputy president’s office from signing and implementing a treatment and prevention plan costs our society more than 600 lives and many new HIV infections every day. The government uses Parliament, Cabinet, provincial governments and all its resources including the Government Communication and Information Service, in the person of comrade Joel Netshitenze, or health communications officer, Joanne Collinge, to justify its denial of life-saving medicines to people who need them. It uses these resources to protect the reputation of the minister of health. And you add your voices to their chorus? When will you join reason, passion and anger to win treatment for people living with HIV/Aids and a decent public health system for all?
The TAC will win in this campaign because its members act in good faith. And when we win, we will sit down on any day with the government for as long as it takes to tackle all the difficult problems of HIV/Aids and the health system. These wounds between ourselves and the government will not be healed easily. But they will heal easier than the pain of the millions who are denied life-saving treatment and those who have succumbed to that pain.
* Zackie Achmat is the Treatment Action Campaign’s chairperson
* See the Equity and Health General section of Equinet News for more news on this issue.
1. Editorial
2. Equity in Health
South Africa's National Association of People Living with HIV/AIDS (NAPWA) on continued a protest outside the Johannesburg offices of a drug multinational as part of its "Black Easter" campaign. The campaign was launched to "convince pharmaceutical companies to provide free antiretroviral drugs in the country" and included demonstrations outside the offices of the Pharmaceutical Manufacturing Association (PMA), NAPWA national director, Nkululeko Nxesi, told PlusNews.
GlaxoSmithKline, the world's largest maker of AIDS drugs, has announced that it is further cutting the prices of these drugs by as much as half in poor countries. The price of Combivir, the company's popular AIDS therapy that combines two drugs in a single pill, has been cut to 90 cents a day, from $1.70, a reduction of 47 percent, the company said. With the reduction, the medicine is available at a price roughly equivalent to some generic versions of AIDS drugs, it said. The price of Combivir in the United States is about $18 a day.
"Awareness of health equity as an international issue has reached the point where sufficient momentum has built up to stimulate the types of collaborative action that are necessary to monitor and advocate for health equity worldwide." (Whitehead M, Dahlgren G, Gilson L. Developing the policy response to inequities in health: a global perspective. In: Evans et al (eds), 2001). Whitehead and Evans argue for practical initiatives including enlarging the health equity policy community, by building or strengthening networks of researchers and advocates. As a step along these lines an information resource has been published detailing organisations, people, networks and resources relevant to work on health inequities, covering those with a strong interest in health inequities, as well as outlining the health equity interest of some of the large international and funding organisations. The emphasis in this document is on low and middle income countries since work regarding health inequalities in the richer industrialised countries is advanced in comparison.
How successful is South Africa at providing decent healthcare for all its citizens? Is the gap in healthcare between the poorest members of society and the richest getting narrower? The Universities of Cape Town and Witwatersrand, South Africa, looked at South Africa’s efforts to ensure all sections of the population have proper access to health services. A right to good health services is enshrined in the country’s constitution and has played an important part in ensuring the health service remains a priority. Nevertheless the study found certain problems have arisen in the drive to create an equitable health system.
With an increasing number of HIV/AIDS patients seeking health care from already over-stretched public sector facilities, the HIV/AIDS epidemic is undermining the quality of care in South Africa's health system. According to The South African Health Review (SAHR) for 2002, published recently by the NGO Health Systems Trust (HST), HIV/AIDS is the "single most important" challenge to improving health care delivery in the country.
Effective tools to control malaria are available now but are not being accessed by the populations in need. The prime example is insecticide-treated bednets (ITNs). Most malaria-carrying mosquitoes bite at night. Thus ITNs have been proven to reduce malaria infection and death rates by forming both a physical barrier against mosquitoes and, in the words of the World Health Organisation (WHO) ‘generating a chemical halo’ around the bed, repelling and killing mosquitoes. However, for people in rural Africa, bednets are hard to get hold of. In these areas, access is often restricted to those with money to buy them from urban centres, or to those taking part in isolated research projects and localised bednet programmes.
The spread of tuberculosis has been relentless in Zambia, southern Africa in the last thirty seven years and the trend continues to date. This disturbing fact was published recently in the South African Journal of Medicine by a group of Zambian doctors led by Dr. Mwaba, working together with doctors from London. The study reviewed official health records of TB cases reported throughout the country between January 1, 1964 to December 31, 2000.
The South African AIDS advocacy group Treatment Action Campaign held an international day of protest on April 24 against the South African government's handling of the AIDS epidemic, demanding that the government improve access to antiretroviral drugs.
What would be the cost of introducing AIDS-related prevention and treatment programmes in South Africa? This paper, produced by the Centre for Social Science Research (CSSR) at the University of Cape Town, attempts to answer this question by combining detailed information about the costs of implementing several interventions with demographic projections of their impact. Information about prices, wages and other cost components is drawn from a range of primary and secondary sources.
Government attempts over the past five years to get private medical schemes to take care of more South Africans have failed as high costs have generally precluded those earning less than R5 000 from joining private schemes. Medical inflation has outpaced overall inflation by around 5% every year, and this has virtually nullified regulations introduced from January 1999 aimed at opening up the private sector.
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3. Human Resources
SAfAIDS offers technical assistance to institutions, the private sector and NGOs in the southern Africa region in developing workplace policies that address HIV and AIDS. To date they have worked with several organisations on this using participatory methods that help to create staff ownership of their policy. These policies can assist in preventing new infections, mitigating the impact of AIDS and giving guidelines on how to manage HIV in the world of work. One of the key lessons learnt is that there is a general reluctance to disclose HIV status by employees for fear of victimisation, making it difficult for them to get support from their employers. Stigma and discrimination are still prevalent in the world of work both in the formal and informal sectors. To support their current work and also to disseminate information in the area of policy development they have written a brochure on " Steps in developing a workplace policy that addresses HIV/AIDS." The brochure is currently available in hard copy but SAfAIDS are planning to post it on our website soon (www.safaids.org.zw). To be included on the mailing list for this particular brochure please contact info@safaids.org.zw
Despite the undoubted importance of human resources to the functions of health systems, there is little consistency between countries in how human resource strategies are monitored and evaluated. This paper presents an integrated approach for developing an evidence base on human resources for health (HRH) to support decision-making, drawing on a framework for health systems performance assessment. Major variations in the supply of health personnel and training opportunities are found to occur by region. However, certain discrepancies are also observed in measuring the same indicator from different sources, possibly related to the occupational classification or to the sources’ representation.
Conservative estimates by Wilma Meeus and David Sanders at the University of the Western Cape’s School of Public Health show that the United States has saved at least U$3,86-million(R30,9 million) in training fees by employing doctors from Nigeria, which has lost 21 000 doctors to the superpower.
While Malawi's health sector is already hurt by shortages of drugs due to a constrained government budget, and a rising death toll because of HIV/AIDS, an exodus of medical personnel to richer western nations is threatening to cripple the already ailing sector.
As the economic burden of HIV/AIDS increases in sub-Saharan Africa, allocation of the burden among levels and sectors of society is changing. The private sector has more scope to avoid the economic burden of AIDS than governments, households, or nongovernmental organisations, and the burden is being systematically shifted away from the private sector. Common practices that transfer the burden to households and government include: Pre-employment screening; Reductions in employee benefits; Restructured employment contracts; Outsourcing of low skilled jobs; Selective retrenchments; and Changes in production technologies. This paper was produced by the Department of International Health at Boston School of Public Health.
This paper from the Department of International Health at Boston School of Public Health is to summarizes what is known about the internal costs of HIV/AIDS, such as increasing absenteeism, higher pension payouts, and breakdowns in worker discipline and morale, to companies in Commonwealth countries in sub-Saharan Africa. The authors identify a dozen different types of workforce costs that HIV/AIDS will impose on African companies in the coming years. After briefly reviewing existing estimates of the costs of HIV/AIDS to business, they present a model for assessing these costs and describe some of the strategies companies are adopting to reduce the costs.
4. Public-Private Mix
Does competition improve hospital services? Do market forces in healthcare benefit the poorest members of society? Reforms which involve exposing hospitals to market forces are being introduced in many developing countries. However, very little is known about how these markets operate, particularly in developing countries. The University of Zambia, together with the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, considered the effect of competition among hospitals in Zambia. The study examined hospitals in Lusaka, Central and Copperbelt provinces. Data on hospital use, revenues and expenditure, and charges for services were collected for the period 1996 to 1999 from each hospital using routine hospital records. In addition, a patient questionnaire was used in facilities to elicit patients’ views of the quality of services. As well as private for-profit and mine hospitals (facilities operated by the mining industry), "private" services included the private fee-paying services provided in government hospitals (known in Zambia as "high cost" services").
Public-private partnerships (PPPs) are becoming a popular mode of tackling large, complicated, and expensive public health problems. However, little is known about the conditions when partnerships succeed, about the strategies for structuring partnerships, or about the ethical underpinnings of partnerships. This book from the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies presents the results of a workshop examining questions about public-private partnerships in international public health, focusing on the organisational and ethical challenges of partnerships, and ways to address them. The essays in this volume offer some new perspectives on partnerships and provide empirical evidence of both benefits and challenges of PPPs.
5. Resource allocation and health financing
This posting from Africa Action contains a news update and excerpts from two recent reports documenting the wide gap between the consensus on the need for greater funding for fighting the HIV/AIDS pandemic and the failure in practice to provide that funding. First, a report from the IMF/World Bank released for the spring meetings, summarized by the Kaiser Daily HIV/AIDS Reports and excerpted briefly below, documents that "if current budgetary trends continue, donor support in 2003 will still be much less than the bare minimum required for basic prevention and care programs". Secondly, an article from the Global Fund Observer newsletter notes the failure of the Global Fund itself to develop a fundraising strategy.
The fight against AIDS will need more resources from the US, with faster delivery, than what the President is proposing," says Dr. Paul Zeitz, Executive Director of the Global AIDS Alliance. "We will need fast action by Republican and Democratic leaders in the US Congress to deliver on an appropriate package for 2003 and 2004. It's very disappointing the President (George W. Bush) is not calling for a more rapid increase in new funding. Plus, it's troubling that the President gives such short shrift to the Global Fund, which is fast running out of resources."
The WHO’s Commission on Macroeconomics and Health recommends a large increase in funding for health interventions in poor countries. But money alone is unlikely to be able to address the constraints facing health systems. What factors hamper the widespread implementation of health programmes for the poor and what options are available to tackle them? A relatively small number of health conditions are responsible for the majority of the burden of ill-health in poor countries. Effective interventions exist to prevent and treat most of these conditions, but these interventions are not available or accessible to the world's poor. A dramatic expansion in access to these priority services is urgently needed.
The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) has expressed concern that the world has dropped further behind commitments made at a 1994 global conference to invest $17 billion a year on population and reproductive health by 2000. “Given rising demands and HIV/AIDS infections, the mobilization of resources is more critical to the success of the Cairo Programme of Action and the Millennium Development Goals,” UNFPA Executive Director Thoraya Obaid said.
6. Governance and participation in health
You are invited to light a virtual candle for someone who has been touched by HIV/AIDS. Visit http://www.candlelightmemorial.org/lightcandle to be a part of the fastest growing on-line AIDS Candlelight Memorial. The "On-Line AIDS Candlelight Memorial", which is part of the Global Health Council's International AIDS Candlelight Memorial Campaign, gives people from around the world the opportunity to join millions of others in remembering those who have been impacted by HIV/AIDS. Once you have lit your virtual candle, you will have the opportunity to join the world's largest grassroots AIDS event and register your community to be part of the "International AIDS Candlelight Memorial" on May 18, 2003. By organizing a Memorial for May 18, you will be lighting candles in solidarity with millions of other individuals in more than 90 countries around the world.
To begin planning its program, the new Ethiopian Ministry of Youth, Sports, and Culture turned to an approach called participatory learning and action, or PLA. Officials involved young people throughout the country in a learning and planning process for the Ministry. The youth developed a national youth charter and a 3-year action plan to mobilize youth for improved sexual health and HIV/AIDS preventive behavior. Plus, the process led to the creation of a dynamic network of young people committed to the health and future of the country.
7. Monitoring equity and research policy
The social and environmental contexts that determine disease are no longer simply domestic but increasingly global. The box in this article lists what we consider the main inherently global health issues, a term describing health determining phenomena that transcend national borders and political jurisdictions. Considerable research exists on each of these issues, although not always with health as a principal outcome. Greater attention in research is required to the linkages between these issues and to their economic and political drivers that are, like the issues, increasingly global in scope. Such drivers include macroeconomic policies associated with international finance institutions, liberalisation of trade and investment, global trade agreements, and technological innovations, all of which are creating greater interdependence between people and places. Assessing how these inherently global health issues affect health is a complex task. Recent work on locating these inherently global health issues in comprehensive health frameworks, however, will prove useful in identifying specific research questions that are useful to policy makers and civil society.
This study aims to assess id21's success in increasing the influence of UK-funded research within international development policy. It begins by examining the ways in which policy-makers access and employ research. The study then uses these findings to assess the validity and performance of the dissemination methods id21 currently uses.
8. Useful Resources
'HIV & AIDS Treatment in Practice' is an email newsletter for doctors, nurses, health care workers and community treatment advocates working in limited-resource settings. It is published twice every month by NAM, the UK-based HIV information charity behind www.aidsmap.com. The newsletter is edited by Julian Meldrum, NAM's international editor.
The International AIDS Economics Network (IAEN /
http://www.iaen.org) recently polled its members in 130 countries about the best information resources available to AIDS professionals worldwide. The polling returned 85 completed surveys from 32 countries listing over 700 information resources. Approximately half of the returned surveys were from developed countries, half from developing countries.
Malaria Journal is a peer-reviewed open access journal that publishes original research papers on all aspects of malaria. The journal is edited by Marcel Hommel and a broad-based international editorial board. Malaria Journal has now published 24 articles, all of which you can freely access over the internet. Take a moment to browse the latest articles and consider sending your next manuscript to them.
Pathologies of Power uses harrowing stories of life--and death--in extreme situations to interrogate our understanding of human rights. Paul Farmer, a physician and anthropologist with twenty years of experience working in Haiti, Peru, and Russia, argues that promoting the social and economic rights of the world's poor is the most important human rights struggle of our times. With passionate eyewitness accounts from the prisons of Russia and the beleaguered villages of Haiti and Chiapas, this book links the lived experiences of individual victims to a broader analysis of structural violence. Farmer challenges conventional thinking within human rights circles and exposes the relationships between political and economic injustice, on one hand, and the suffering and illness of the powerless, on the other.
The Human Rights Matrix lists the international human rights documents that are important to reproductive and maternal health, family planning, and HIV/AIDS. The Matrix permits you to access information about a POLICY country's human rights obligations. You can: Select a POLICY country and see the RH/MH/FP/HIV/AIDS-related human rights documents this country has signed; Select a right and see what RH/MH/FP/HIV/AIDS-related human rights documents have to say about this right; Select a document and see which rights are listed in this document and the document's exact language about this right.
In an effort to place gender equality at the center of the fight against HIV/AIDS, the UN has launched its first comprehensive Web site that promotes understanding, knowledge and action on the epidemic as a gender and human rights issue. "By bringing knowledge and information to the global community, we are able to empower women," said Noeleen Heyzer, executive director of the UN Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM). Designed to be user-friendly, informative and interactive, the site offers research, training materials, surveys, advocacy tools, current news and opinion pieces by leading experts.
The Virtual Campus for Public Health (VCPH) is a virtual space for interchange, communication, information, generation of useful knowledge, education and discussions among individuals and institutions on topics and priority issues related to processes of health sector reform, performance of essential public health functions, public health management and the institutional development of public health education.
During a 7-week period from April 14, 2003 through May 30, 2003, the World Bank and Public World will co-host a moderated electronic discussion on the forthcoming WDR 2004: "Making Services Work for Poor People". The e-discussion is an opportunity for a wide range of stakeholders from government, business, and civil society to exchange views about the content and main ideas of the draft report.
The World Health Chart is developed in collaboration between WHO and Swedish institutions. The aim is to visualize world health development and thereby enable better use of international health data for learning, advocacy and hypothesis generation. A first beta-version called WHC 2001 Public Beta 0.1 is now free to download for testing. Please comment to whc@ki.se It can be used by: Teachers and students of health, economics and demography; Professionals and policy makers in the health sector; Staff of international organisations; Researchers and journalists. It can be used to: Learn and teach about health development in the world; Illustrate projects, presentations, articles and campaigns; Advocacy and policy analysis; Generate ideas and hypotheses for research; Assessment of international health data.
9. Jobs and Announcements
The Global Network of People Living with HIV/AIDS (GNP+) and the National Guidance and Empowerment Network of Uganda (NGEN+) invite HIV+ people worldwide and their allies to the 11th International Conference for People Living with HIV/AIDS, to be held October 26-30 at the Speke Resort and Country Lodge Munyonyo, Kampala, Uganda. The theme of this conference is "The Dawn of New Positive Leadership".
The African Health Sciences Congress (AHSC) is a premier scientific meeting that has found a permanent place in Africa. Each year, the congress is hosted in different countries in Africa, by a National Health Research Institute in collaboration with other institutions interested in undertaking health related activities. Professional heath related bodies have also been instrumental in participation of hosting and managing the Congress. AHSC is one of the major forums on which Africans from all around the continent meet and share recent developments on health issues, disseminate and present their scientific findings, promote, encourage and coordinate research capabilities, exchange ideas, and network among members and institutions involved in heath research directly or otherwise. We are pleased to inform you that the Ethiopian Health & Nutrition Research Institute (EHNRI) in collaboration with national sister institutions, nationwide professional associations, governmental organisations, non-governmental organizations, UN related agencies and many significant stakeholders, established a National Organising Committee (NOC) that will take up the challenges and responsibilities of organising the 24th African Health Sciences Congress (AHSC) in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
The Chilean Initiative for Equity in Health cordially invites you to visit their renovated website, with exhaustive and diverse information on the theme of health equity not only relevant to Chile but also of general interest for those around the world.
Population and health studies, demographic surveys, censuses, and other research findings can play a key role in guiding policy and resource-allocation decisions. Yet every year, millions of dollars are spent to produce research results that fail to reach policymakers and, consequently, are not used to shape policies and programs. To help bridge the gap between researchers and policymakers, Makerere University and the Population Reference Bureau are cosponsoring a communication workshop. Sessions will help participants identify the policy implications of survey data and research findings, understand how research can influence the policy process, and communicate findings.
As of December 2002, an estimated 42 million people worldwide are infected with HIV/AIDS. Seventy percent of these people live in sub-Saharan Africa, where HIV/AIDS is now the leading cause of death. These devastating figures, and the fact that many of these people are of childbearing age, make it clear that this epidemic requires creative interventions that help prevent the spread of HIV and programs that address both the fragile healthcare workforce and the patients who need basic reproductive healthcare services. The JHPIEGO Corporation has begun developing education and training programs in response to this epidemic and the resulting need for a healthcare workforce educated about the family planning and reproductive health needs of clients with HIV/AIDS. JHPIEGO offered a 14-week e-mail course, "Meeting the Family Planning and Reproductive Health (FP/RH) Needs of Clients with HIV/AIDS in Low-Resource Settings."
The 3rd International Conference of the International Society for Equity in Health will be hosted by the Health Systems Trust (HST), a South African-based NGO, the Southern African Regional Network on Equity in Health (EQUINET) and the Global Equity Gauge Alliance (GEGA), an international consortium of initiatives to support health equity. The meeting will bring together researchers, policy-makers, practitioners and others concerned with equity in health to develop an international health agenda for governments, universities and organisations all over the world. The 3rd International Conference theme is “Pathways to equity in health: Using research for policy and advocacy”. The Conference will explore this theme through a varied program of plenary sessions, forums, poster sessions and scientific sessions. We invite and welcome your participation in the effort towards advancement of knowledge, fostering of the exchange of experiences and promotion of equity in health.
The Alliance for Health Policy and Systems Research announces its 3rd call for Research for Policy Grants. The topic for this round is Health System Development and Scaling-Up Priority Services. Research proposals should aim to improve health in low and middle in-
come countries through applying quantitative and/or qualitative methods to the understanding and explanation of critical issues in the scaling-up and integration within national health systems of priority health services and disease control programmes.
Applications are invited for an appointment as a Social Scientist to manage the evaluation of the Stepping Stones programme. This is the UNAIDS recommended best practice for community mobilisation in HIV prevention and has the long-term goal of reducing or restricting the growth of HIV prevalence in The Gambia. You will be responsible for the smooth running of the study, which includes closely supervising the Field Assistants in data collection.