Last week we participated in the 2024 Emerging Voices venture here in Nagasaki, Japan – respectively as an EV from the new cohort and as a facilitator. A visit to FARM UNZEN, a center for equine-assisted therapy in the Nagasaki prefecture, was the backdrop for this article. We were amazed by the innovative use of horses here in Japan. Back in...

India faces both opportunities and significant challenges as it strives to meet SDG 3 targets of “ensuring healthy lives and promoting well-being for all at all ages” by 2030, and halving premature mortality by 2050, in line with the recently released Lancet Commission’s Global Health 2050 report. Although India has undertaken ambitious in...

On November 6, the day after the US presidential elections, in the train from Paris to Brussels, I’m looking hard for a silver lining. (That is a mental health lifestyle choice of me, always look for silver linings.) The only one I can come up with is: clarity. Under president Trump, international cooperation in health will serve the interests...

It’s hard to gauge how much of the world’s attention is focused on the World Health Assembly this week. It does, after all, coincide with the launch of Chapter 5, Season 3 of Fortnite, the popular online shoot ‘em up video game. I imagine most people under the age of twenty care more about that than they do about global health. For the uni...

In recent decades, Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD) has become a global public health concern.  That is no different in my country, India. As per the 2019 Global Burden of Disease study, India now has the highest number of deaths due to CKD, followed by China and Japan. True, we do have a lot of people in India, but there’s more to it, unfortunate...

On March 5th and 6th, 2024,  ReACT Africa  officially launched the African Youth AMR Alliance Task Force  in Nairobi, Kenya, at an inaugural workshop. ReACT Africa, which brings together experts and key stakeholders to form technical working groups on antimicrobial resistance (AMR), convened the workshop with participation from the Food and Agri...

In the aftermath of their various coups d’état, the military juntas in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger had perhaps hoped that Technical and Financial Partners (TFPs) would continue to cover a big chunk of the health expenditure, given their own focus on the security crisis and the already low state budget allocation to the health sector in ordinar...

While progress has been made, AIDS remains a significant challenge. Last year, globally, 630,000 people died from AIDS-related illnesses, 1.3 million were newly infected with HIV, and 9.2 million lacked access to life-saving HIV treatment. In Zimbabwe in 2022 alone, there were 20,000 AIDS-related deaths and 17,000 new HIV infections. Against tha...

In the 2023 Political Declaration on Universal Health Coverage (UHC), governments missed the opportunity to truly advance gender-responsive UHC, particularly regarding the sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) of women, girls, gender-diverse and marginalized groups. The Alliance for Gender Equality and UHC has consistently called on g...