“The world is but a canvas to the imagination” Henry David Thoreau Nothing provides humanity with such of an opportunity as that of a crisis. At the beginning of 2020, many of us working in the field of health policy and systems research continued about our daily tasks in a routine manner, following the expert prescriptions we hoped would he...

Decolonizing health in Africa is a conscientization project, historical and political in nature, that calls for a (k)new language and (k)new ways of being as thinkers and practitioners. On the 30th September 2020, 1st and 2nd October 2020, we plan to host a virtual Africa convening  to have a conversation about decoloniality in the broader fie...

The novel coronavirus has spread from China to over 170 countries – including all African countries – with millions of cases and hundreds of thousands of deaths globally. Egypt recorded Africa’s first COVID-19 case on February 14, 2020. In six months, the continent has gone from one to a million confirmed cases with over 700, 000 recoveries. A...

On August 12 we celebrated International youth day and this year the United Nations theme is youth engagement for global action. The last 12 months have seen a whirlwind of youth participating as leaders for a better world, as change makers and as an added bonus, the group most resilient to COVID-19 infection. Young people are leading all of us ...

The deepening crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic continues to expose the deficiencies of the current political and economic structures across the world. In the case of India, in particular, it has taken only a few months for the virus to ravage the country’s social fabric and dismantle its economic order rendering millions jobless, incomes and sa...

(with support from Yaimie Lopez, Kim Ozano & Werner Soors) On July 28th, António Guterres launched the UN policy brief COVID-19 in an urban world. The brief starts off with the finding that 90% of all reported COVID-19 cases so far occurred in cities, and highlights the critical role local governments play in crisis response, recovery and rebui...

Learning to live in a new country comes with the excitement of engaging with the world in a new way – but it is equally fraught with difficulties. I stayed in Rwanda from 2007 to 2012 where I was faced with the challenge of taking up French and Kinyarwanda as new languages in order to be more responsive to my Rwandan colleagues at the MoH dece...

World Sickle Cell Day has been observed on June 19th every year since 2008, when the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution that recognizes Sickle Cell Disease (SCD) as a public health problem and “one of the world’s foremost genetic diseases.” The day attempts to raise awareness of the disease at the national and internation...

India’s response to COVID-19 relies heavily on the female Frontline Health Workers (FLWs), also known as Community Health Workers (CHWs). FLWs include Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHAs), Auxiliary Nurse Midwives (ANMs), and Anganwadi Workers (AWWs). From the beginning of the pandemic, they have been involved in surveillance, home visit...