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Welcome to the SHAPES blog series, hosted by IHP. SHAPES is a thematic working group within Health Systems Global, which facilitates discussion, debate and collaboration around social science approaches for research and engagement in health policy & systems. In the months leading up to the 6th Global Symposium on Health Systems Research in Dubai (Nov 2020) SHAPES members will be blogging about the Symposium's theme of "re-imagining health systems for better health and social justice" through a social science lens.

Using popular education in an online environment: lessons learned from the Community Health Worker Common Indicators Summit

Popular (people’s) education is a philosophy and methodology that has been used widely to balance power and voice and build trust in diverse contexts, with the broader goal of creating a more just and equitable society. Never has such an approach been so necessary. In the US, we stand at the crossroads of the COVID-19 pandemic and the uprising...

By Keara Rodela and Noelle Wiggins and Kenneth Maes on December 7, 2020

Legal empowerment in health contributes to equitable health systems: some reflections from Latin America

The gaps around the enjoyment of the human right to health in Latin America and other parts of the world are still alarming. Inequity in access to basic services persists, especially for vulnerable groups. In response to these inequities in Latin America and other countries, judicial litigation around the right to health has expanded significant...

By Ana Raquel Aquino Smith on October 29, 2020

Regulation of the for-profit private healthcare sector in India: Whose voices are being heard in policy making?

Indian civil society networks and health professionals are urgently demanding better regulation of the for-profit private healthcare sector. India’s health system is dominated by the for-profit private healthcare sector, which accounts for around 75% of outpatient care. In 2016-17, the hospital industry in India was already worth around Rs. 4 ...

By Shweta Marathe on September 24, 2020

Covid-19: an opportunity for social innovation?

“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...

By Lindi van Niekerk on August 27, 2020

Lessons in immersion: how learning Kinyarwanda and French, and driving on the other side of the road helped me gain fluency in HPSR

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...

By Aaron Mulaki on July 30, 2020

Engagement and responsibility: ethical challenges of doing an ethnography on the streets of Delhi

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...

By Bincy Mathew on June 25, 2020

Strengthening primary health care in India: the role of power in agenda setting and policy formulation

Policymaking is an inherently political process marked, more often than not, by ambiguity, negotiations and shifting priorities. Policy actors (elected leaders, bureaucrats, technocrats, civil society activists, lobbyists, media…) play an important role in agenda setting and policy formulation – stages we will focus on in this article. Each ...

By Shweta Singh on May 28, 2020

Community Health Workers and the Power of Measurement

The Community Health Worker Common Indicators Project How should community health worker (CHW) programs be evaluated?  A collaborative team recently published an important article advancing an answer to this pressing question, focused  on CHW programs in low- and middle-income countries. Here, we provide a complementary answer to this question, ...

By Keara Rodela and Kenneth Maes and Noelle Wiggins and Edith Kieffer and Gloria Palmisano on May 12, 2020

Right or Privilege: The urgency to re-examine refugees’ right to health in Lebanon

A few years back, walking through the narrow trail at Mar Elias Camp, I wasn’t able to process the telltale signs. Today, crouching under the looming entangled electrical wires and jumping across dirtied waterbeds snaking around makeshift houses, I understand the importance of rethinking health initiatives put forth in my country, Lebanon. This ...

By Sima Bou Jawde on April 23, 2020