Forty years after the well-intentioned Alma Ata Declaration (1978), ‘Health for All’ remains a distant goal. This is particularly so for populations living in vulnerable parts of the world – conflict areas, prone to natural disasters, or geographically remote and vulnerable areas such as the Sundarbans in India. How does one, in the era of...

Over the past few days, I’ve been fortunate to attend the first half of the 142nd session of WHO’s Executive Board meeting in Geneva, after a couple of  preparatory civil society meetings  hosted by the Geneva Global Health Hub (G2H2). The EB meeting provides a fresh start to the new (global health) year, and the hope is of course that for...

This year Dr Tedros will attend the Davos meeting, together with many other heads of state and leaders of international organizations, as well as civil society representatives and many other “leaders” in various sectors. While I understand this fits in his focus on a boosted WHO presence at international global policy fora, I personally thin...

It’s been a few months now, but it doesn’t really feel like that for me. In October 2017, I attended the inaugural conference of Women Leaders in Global Health, a movement launched in Stanford, California. It seeks to provide a global platform for women in the health professions to thrash out their career growth obstacles, and ways to overco...

The French President Emmanuel Macron had, as one might expect, a busy end of the year 2017, full of visits and meetings with other heads of States to tackle global problems (and he still had time for some celebration for his 40th birthday at the Chambord castle – or was it an early Christmas celebration?). On November 28th 2017 he was in Ouaga...

In the early days of the New Year, i find myself looking into some of the background documents for the upcoming Executive Board (EB) meeting of WHO later this month, EB 142.  After the last special Board meeting in November 2017 (EBSS4), where WHO’s new DG Dr. Tedros discussed a (revised) draft version of WHO’s ambitious 13th Global Program...

The weekly International Health Policies (IHP) newsletter  is a flagship (knowledge management) activity of the IHP network, funded by DGD. The network aims to “empower committed groups of global health experts based in the South through innovative collaborative models allowing them to have greater control on policy and implementation knowled...

Last week at the UHC Forum 2017 in Tokyo, the Health Systems Governance Collaborative and the UHC Partnership launched the Bold Moves Campaign and issued a manifesto calling for a “radical rethink” of governance and collaboration strategies. Emboldened and inspired by the manifesto, we decided right away to answer the call, and spin some ide...

In 2013, The Lancet Commission on Investing in Health showed that a ‘Grand Convergence in global health’ was possible by 2035, i.e. “within one generation”, by boosting focused health sector investments. Infectious, child & maternal deaths can all be reduced to the levels of the best-performing middle-income countries by then, was the me...