Before November 2016, it had been quite a while since I attended any health conference. I therefore was ecstatic when the opportunity came for me to attend the 4th Global Symposium on Health Systems Research in Vancouver as part of the West African Network of Emerging Leaders in health policy and systems (WANEL). At the time, I had no clue what ...

It always surprises me how easily some pundits get carried away, as if they’re politicians trying to frame the debate along lines they prefer. Give them a few “new trends”, let them compare these trends with some rather questionable “benchmarks” and hey, we wake up in a bright new world, with a ‘new golden decade’ just around the c...

Earlier this week, a group of 30 researchers, program implementers, and activists met in Washington, DC, to develop a research agenda on “community health worker voice, power, and citizens’ right to health.” The meeting was convened by Columbia University’s Averting Maternal Death and Disability Program and American University’s Accoun...

Pakistan, a lower-middle income country in South Asia, spends around three percent of its GDP on health, resulting in 39.5 US$ per capita health expenditure. Households’ out of pocket expenditures make up 60 percent of the total health expenditures in the country and catastrophic health expenditures amount to 70 percent of the economic shocks ...

In this short piece, I’ll try to critically self-reflect on my own practice as lecturer health policy analysis at the Institute of Tropical Medicine. (No worries, I’m a social scientist: we do self-reflection and meta-analysis for a living 🙂 ) For some time now, something in the back of my mind has been nagging me: the feeling that it ca...

“We members of the Global Network for Health in All Policies commit to sharing the experience of institutionalizing the Health in All Policies (HiAP) approach and to facilitating and accelerating HiAP implementation for progressing the Sustainable Development Goals and Universal Health Coverage”. This bold mission statement of the newly laun...

The social sciences are critical to furthering our understanding of health policy and systems around the world. Political science, anthropology, sociology, economics, among other disciplines, provide a range of concepts that allow us to look at our research in a new light – offering new methodologies (process tracing from political science or ...

                                  “We lost an exemplary son, a respectful son-in law, a loving father, a caring husband, a kind brother, a sympathetic relative, a helping neighbor…” were the phrases passed by the dearest of Asmat Malik, who laid him in his grave with sobbing eyes on May 30, midnight. I was among hundreds of Asmat’s frie...

Sometimes a couple of tweets and quotes are all you need to discern a new global health mantra (or is it framing?).   So below I’ll just list a couple of tweets & quotes from the last week which for some reason pushed my buttons (Granted, that isn’t too hard).  I’ll leave you guessing who came up with these quotes, but it wasn’t Joe S...