During my PhD coursework in 2013, I had my first (academic) exposure to the interconnection between human health, environment, and development. At the time, I had to make a field visit to the site where some of the 10,000 families residing in slums at the banks of Sabarmati River in Ahmedabad were rehabilitated – read violently evicted and relo...

As we advocate for health equity in global health settings in different parts of the world, one can see some of the inequities in full display and even amplified in Geneva at the 76th World Health Assembly (WHA76), which I’m currently attending. From restricted access to civil society, to representation among delegates – in terms of youth eng...

As we see women taking up leadership positions around us, we often feel that we have come a long way in terms of achieving gender equality! It is only when one sees the startling facts around female representation that one realizes how much work remains to be done.  Women hold only a quarter of global health leadership positions, while 75% of h...

Travelling “out of India” for an in-person workshop for the first time in almost three years, I landed in Nairobi with anxiety and a ton of self-doubt on how I would engage with the participants of the Women in Global Health (WGH) Peer-to-Peer workshop (24-27th Sept). I had almost forgotten to be “in that zone”, not being an extrovert (...

Women are 70% of health workers across the world, lead and shoulder a significant proportion of the pandemic response, and play key roles in health systems all over the world.  Many of these women, particularly those in lower income countries work as volunteers, in low paid or underpaid roles and without any social protection. WHO’s Global...

Women’s History Month  ended on a rather depressing note, with GH5050’s hard-hitting 2022 report, Boards for All?. Through “A review of power, policy and people on the boards of organizations active in global health”, the report revealed that men from high income countries (HICs) continue to dominate and control the positions of power an...

In March 2021, India witnessed the start of a horrific second wave of COVID-19 which soon became  “world news”. The second wave spread at a pace few imagined and brought an already weak health system to shambles, leaving thousands dead within days. Along with the tragedy of a disease outbreak, essential health services including women�...

The devastating second wave of COVID-19 has severely overstrained and pushed India’s public health system to the limit, breaking horrifying world records in terms of daily cases, with the country accounting now for nearly half of the total reported cases worldwide.  The death toll is immense, and media show heart-rending visuals of people cry...

As you probably know, the World Health Organization had designated 2020 as the Year of The Nurse & Midwife to mark the 200th birth anniversary of Florence Nightingale, the founder of Modern Nursing. Little did the nursing and midwifery community fathom what a ‘profession defining’ year it was going to be when the announcement was made! The ...

All four authors are also co-founders of the WGH India Chapter. We are thrilled to announce our initiative on the occasion of International Women’s Day (March 8), and in so doing, pay tribute to all the women fighting for equal rights and equal representation at their workspaces worldwide. Despite decades of global targets on gender equ...

Between 25th and 28th June, we attended the ICPP2019, short for  ‘the 4th International Conference on Public Policy 2019’. Our first impression of the conference in Montreal was the overwhelming breadth of policy areas discussed at this international platform. The conference sessions overall gave a glimpse of policy, political and governanc...

It is Mental Health Awareness Week (May 13th-19th) and this has, as usual, brought discussions around mental health to the fore. The initiative began in 2001 and has been organised by the Mental Health Foundation, UK since then. Each year has a dedicated theme – this year’s is #bodyimage. ‘Body Image’ is a term that describes how one ...

My recent visit to London gave me a somewhat “homely feeling”. I came across plenty of South Asians in the city, bumping into an Indian/South Asian almost every 200-300 meters, and frequently overhearing conversations in Hindi, my native language. London is a busy city with lots of tourists, and full of foreign students, many of whom come t...

I was more than happy to go back to Geneva again as an IHP Correspondent, this time, to attend the first few days of the 144th WHO Executive Board (EB) Meeting. I went to Geneva, as Lonely Planet would describe it, ‘on a shoestring’. However, the beautiful white landscape due to abundant snowfall made me quickly forget about the budget cons...

As was  covered just last week,  the 6th  Emerging Voices for Global Health (EV4GH) venture (EV2018) took place in Liverpool last month, just before the 5th Global Symposium on Health Systems Research.  By now, EV4GH is a global health network of almost 300 emerging and emerged voices from across the world, a network that has not only grown ...

I was no less than thrilled to be attending the WHO’s first Global Conference on Air Pollution and Health (30 Oct-1 Nov) this week, one for the fact that it was organized by WHO (in collaboration with many intergovernmental organizations) at its headquarters in Geneva, and two for my interest in exploring the area of air pollution and health. ...

Both of us recently attended the World Health Summit (WHS) organized in Berlin from 14-16th October, as some of the “over 2000 delegates and 300 speakers from around 100 countries”. The WHS celebrated its 10th Anniversary this year, among others with the launch of a “Global Action Plan for healthy lives and wellbeing for all” in which 11...

India’s journey towards Universal Health Coverage (UHC) is gaining special attention since the Modi Government announced the country’s largest health care programme ever, named ‘Ayushman Bharat’ on 1st Feb, 2018 – just a year before the general elections scheduled in 2019. By way of example, Richard Horton discusses in this week’s Lanc...

2017: A year with multiple hurricanes of category 4-5 devastating Texas, Florida and the Caribbean islands; monsoon floods displacing millions and killing thousands in South Asia; record wildfires burning ~8.5 mn acres of land in the western US, leaving people around Oregon, Washington and California choking on dangerous levels of smoke; and Del...

I was on a conference marathon, attending 3 prominent international conferences in the area of Public Health (QHR2016, APHA2016 & HSR2016) and an intense training program (EV4GH) across several cities of the U.S. & Canada. It was during my visit to these places that I found numerous homeless people sitting along the street side with notes saying...