Last week, I came across the 10 principles of gender transformative leadership (in a Devex op-ed by Roopa Dhatt et al).  Although I’m not much of a leader (and haven’t really bothered to go through the leadership literature either), it got me thinking, and so below you find some humble suggestions for “ten principles of planetary health (...

Through winning a crowdsourcing writing contest organized by SESHGlobal, I was fortunate to attend the 2nd annual Women Leaders in Global Health (WLGH) Conference held in London on the 8th and 9th of November 2018 at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. I was one of 6 finalists (out of 311 submissions) who had proffered the top 6 ...

This article was co-authored by Shehnaz Munshi, María Rodríguez, Olivia Biermann, Veronica Osorio Calderon, Gloria Nenita Velasco, Shweta Singh, & Fiona C. Kaikai  (all EVs2018)   The Emerging Voices for Global Health (EV4GH)  program started in 2010 as an innovative initiative by the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp (ITM), with Pro...

Last week this short tweet from Devi Sridhar went viral, well, at least among global health twitterandi 🙂  : “Is it just me who thinks #globalhealth has too many meetings, summits & declarations- and not enough of the actual substance of getting things done?” While I’m probably not best placed to ponder this question – given that the...

I was no less than thrilled to be attending the WHO’s first Global Conference on Air Pollution and Health (30 Oct-1 Nov) this week, one for the fact that it was organized by WHO (in collaboration with many intergovernmental organizations) at its headquarters in Geneva, and two for my interest in exploring the area of air pollution and health. ...

On 23 October, an ITM symposium, titled ’40 years after Alma Ata, Primary Health Care in 2018 and beyond, In South and North’ took place in Antwerp. The event was of course a dwarf in the company of the two Primary Health Care (PHC) conference giants, Alma Ata and Astana respectively.  We know our place, do not be mistaken. No hubris at pla...

On 23 October, 150 international experts gathered at the Institute of Tropical Medicine (ITM) in Antwerp for a symposium to take stock on progress on the way to ‘health for all’. Some elephants were spotted in the room. Might one of them be a doctor?   Prof Bart Criel, the initiator of the symposium, rightly pointed out that the Alma-Ata Dec...

      Roopa (center) and Renzo (far right) with WHO Director-General Margaret Chan (2nd from left), UNICEF Executive Director Ann Veneman (2nd from right) and other youth delegates during the 30th-anniversary conference of the Alma Ata Declaration in 2008   It has been 40 years since the adoption of the Declaration of Alma-Ata, which reaffirmed...

Dissonance: Def. 1. n. A harsh, disagreeable combination of sounds; discord, 2.n. Lack of agreement, consistency, or harmony; conflict  (The Free Dictionary). This is the sentiment that stayed with me after having participated in the 5th global conference on Health Systems Research in Liverpool and directly afterwards, the 10th World Health Sum...