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...

The experiences described in this blog are drawn from ongoing ethnographic fieldwork conducted among homeless women with maternal and child health concerns. This is from a project entitled Promoting Evidence-informed Interventions for Communities of the Homeless through an Action Network with the George Institute for Global Health, India. I have...

Last week, a “rate” list from a leading for-profit private hospital in Delhi went viral on social media, probably because of the sheer obscenity of the charges that it displayed. The costs for a bed, as per the list, ranged from Rs. 25,000 (about $330) per day in a general ward (no private room, without isolation or ventilator) to Rs. 72,000...

The world is reeling in the throes of its greatest pandemic since the Spanish Flu of 1918. Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19), a ( mainly) respiratory illness caused by a novel coronavirus has disrupted human lives, economies and governments on a global scale, and the end is not in sight.  By now, there are over 7 million (confirmed) cases and more ...