The healthcare situation in Venezuela has  worsened. In the first three months of 2018 a decay of all indices has been registered, and the forecasts are dismal for the future. Hospitals lack basic staff and people suffer malnutrition. The country is facing the re-emergence of diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis considered “under control...

There exists a tension between the optimism and promise of new technologies, and the reality of working in low resource environments. This tension has an important bearing in global health security, where there is an urgent need to guide and operationalise technological innovations for individual and collective health security. However, new tech...

Post the most traumatic moments of my life (aka the PhD), I jumped with enthusiasm into the civil society space where I was given an exciting challenge to develop youth programmes in sexual and reproductive health (SRHR). We’re coolly known as #SAT4YOUTH! The journey has meant learning to apply theory, and designing programmes to plant the see...

I was at “The WHO at the Crossroads”  workshop which took place in Berlin last week, as an IHP correspondent, and for someone who is relatively new to the global health governance debate, the meeting was very “educational” indeed. Broad themes of discussion on the day were amongst others, the politics and architecture of aid and global ...

With a personnel density of 0.3 doctors, nurses and midwives per 10,000 population, a figure far below the critical threshold of 23 per 10,000, Ethiopia has been categorised as one of the countries with a health workforce “crisis”. The situation is compounded by a substantial geographic maldistribution of the health workforce, as workers tend to...

Canadian leadership in global health: sounds great, right? In Canada, we are well regarded internationally for UHC—anchored in the Canada Health Act, and implemented domestically in our 13 health systems (whether it is equitable is a question we are now grappling with—but more on that later). I’m told that the WHO considers Canada as a lea...

It always surprises me when people who are obviously at least three times smarter than I am fail to see the blatantly obvious, even if at the same time you somehow understand it, given the corners these people are frequenting and their background. No, I won’t go here into the current commotion around the Global Fund’s murky partnership with ...

Twenty years after the Beijing declaration and platform of action on gender equality as a basic human right, the fight for gender equality continues, and “despite progress, societies are still failing women in relation to health, most acutely in poor countries and among the poorest women in all countries.” A parallel can be drawn with the glob...

Having recently undergone the transition from being an academic for over eight years (oh my gosh, yes, grey strands showing) to becoming more active in the civil society space, I have begun to understand and place value on the concept of “meaningful youth engagement”. The term is often bandied about, and usually given a variety of meanings g...