The 2017 Global Evidence Summit was recently held in Cape Town, South Africa. From what we heard, it was a fascinating conference. Too bad we weren’t there. More importantly however, in spite of the organizers’ intention to be highly inclusive and diverse, and participants from 77 countries, a number of countries were not represented, showin...

              Reflections on the 2017 Consortium of Universities in Global Health held in Washington DC, USA (April 6-9)   Health systems are getting more complex than ever, encompassing no longer just the typical building blocks of health systems and their interactions, but also venturing to include areas of study on planetary health – or “ga...

2016 marks a change in history, for better or for worse. In today’s politics, we all witnessed how political correctness, decency and diplomacy were suddenly belittled by being frank, blatant or downright rude, even in dealing with international affairs. Many observers call ours a post-truth post-fact era and even that sounds too nice (I’m f...

Sixty million people are now forcibly displaced globally and about 6% of people in low- and middle-income countries are further pushed into extreme poverty due to medical impoverishment. You don’t have to look far to realise how severe the “gap” is. Just look around: how many of the people you see have poor access to healthcare services? E...

Imagine you’re in a room full of computer monitors and while inside, you ask “Which vaccine would have been most cost-efficient for disease X?”. Only seconds later, the room would turn into an amazing room full of data presented in very engaging and interactive visuals showing you state of the art simulations, discussing your different pol...

It has been almost a year now since I first visited South Africa (SA) back in April 2014 for the Australia-Africa Universities Network (AAUN) conference. At that time, I visited Gauteng, Pretoria – a very beautiful city with probably many other secrets I have yet to discover. I then returned just last September for the Emerging Voices for Glob...

“As we walked out of the room, we knew that things would never be the same again. We were very happy… felt so confident, inspired and prepared to create change for global health across the world” (EV 2014) On 29 September 2014, the emerging voices together with the emerging leaders held their pre-conference program at the University of Wes...

Dear all,   I am Erlyn Macarayan, one of the most recent Emerging Voices for Global Health. Having been privileged to be part of similar professional associations such as the University of Queensland Behavioural and Social Science Research Review Board and the Australian Political Studies Association, I hope to be able to further apply the knowl...