Global Health Watch 2 Launches in Thailand

By Sarah Shannon, Executive Director, Hesperian Foundation    

From Togo, Tanzania, Finland, Australia and beyond, 80 people from around the world participated in a launch of the Global Health Watch 2  in Bangkok on January 27 to celebrate the publication of this alternative world health report.  The launch event was organized by People's Health Movement as an event to kick off the Prince Mahidol Award Conference activities. I attended the conference as part of the People's Health Movement delegation.  Dr. Suwit Wibulpolprasert, Senior Advisor on Disease Control for the Ministry of Public Health in Thailand; David McCoy, Managing Editor of the Global Health Watch 2; David Sanders of the People's Health Movement - South Africa; and Bridget Lloyd the Co-ordinator for the Global Health Watch 2 project spoke at the event.

As noted by Dr Wibulpolprasert, the Global Health Watch 2 covers a comprehensive range of topics and draws attention to the politics of global health and the policies and actions of key players.  Presenters discussed the chapters on the United States foreign assistance program, the Gates Foundation, the World Bank, the World Health Organization, and the Global Fund to Fight to AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. The recognition of equity and social justice as values that must drive health policy in order to achieve Health for All is a central theme of the Global Health Watch 2. The speakers (even the World Bank!) all made that a touchstone of their presentations.  

This ties in well with the Prince Mahidol Award Conference, which focuses heavily this year on the conclusions of World Health Organization's Commission on the Social Determinants of Health.  "Inequities are killing people on a grand scale," concluded the commission, "(the) toxic combination of bad policies, economics, and politics is, in large measure, responsible for the fact that a majority of people in the world do not enjoy the good health that is biologically possible."  The Global Health Watch 2 puts these conclusions in a more accessible and actionable framework, for everyone from health activists to policy-makers.

Events to launch the Global Health Watch 2 in various US cities are being organized.  To organize or participate in an event in your city, or to learn more about what is being planned, please contact Dorothy Tegeler <dorothy@hesperian.org>. 

To buy the book, click here. To download the book for free, click here.

 

Long-time Partner Jamkhed in National Geographic

Well-deserved recognition for Jamkhed's village health workers! 

The December edition of National Geographic highlighted the great health work done by the women health workers of Jamkhed, in India. The article "Necessary Angels" provides an inspiring description of the importance of grassroots health workers in the process of improving community health. Hesperian has long admired, learned from, and partnered with Jamkhed, located in a rural area of Maharashtra state. Jamkhed's village health workers field tested sections of A Book for Midwives, and various members of the Jamkhed team reviewed sections of our new A Community Guide to Environmental Health.  Their insights and suggestions significantly improved both books. 

Congratulations to Jamkhed for helping to bring mainstream media attention to the success of Primary Health Care and the critical role that women health workers play! 

Solidarity in the Snow: Women Gather at SAR to Work on New Book

When 10 women got together recently during a snowstorm, their creative ideas served not only to warm them, but also to move forward a book project Hesperian is developing using a new and challenging process—the Women’s Action Guide (working title), a comprehensive resource for community-based health care workers and activists looking for ways to share the health and medical information in Hesperian’s book Where Women Have No Doctor.     

All Hesperian books are developed using a collaborative process that includes input from expert advisors, grassroots community review, and field testing of draft material. The Women’s Action Guide is our first project to bring a group of advisors together in real time to share their collective wisdom with each other as we work together to develop the book. With long-standing experience and connections with community-based women’s health groups all over the world, the group is well equipped to address some emerging challenges in framing this much needed resource.

The setting for this productive, albeit chilly, encounter was mid-December at the School for Advanced Research (SAR), in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Founded in 1907 as a study center for archaeology and ethnology of the American Southwest, SAR has grown to support advanced study and communication about human culture, evolution, history, and creative expression, to contribute to a better understanding of the human experience. Housed since the ‘70s in the tranquil former estate of two wealthy sisters from New York who were patrons and promoters of Indian art, SAR awards residencies to researchers, writers, educators, and artists, and supports numerous short seminars throughout the year. Seminars cover such topics as cultural perspectives on cancer, early complex societies of Africa, dreams in cross-cultural perspective, and early plant husbandry in North America. For more about SAR, see www.sarweb.org.

This was the second meeting SAR hosted for Hesperian to work on this project. In September 2007, a small group mapped out a preliminary plan for the Women’s Action Guide. At this recent meeting a larger working group gathered, including women from India, Kenya, Lebanon, South Africa and the US, all of whom share the vision of an adaptable, relevant, cutting-edge guide that respects the experience and working context of local activists.

During the months between meetings, group members had collected a tremendous amount of information about the health dilemmas women in poor countries around the world face, and the strategies and activities various creative organizers and educators use to share critical health information. The research process generated far more material than can be included in the planned 350-page book, so we decided to use this meeting to develop a way to prioritize the issues and activities to include in the book.

As a test case, we used the topic of safe motherhood, one of the early research projects to be completed (by longtime Hesperian colleague Pallavi Patel from India, whose birthday we also celebrated during the meeting). Key factors raised in the research on a woman’s health during pregnancy and birth include gender inequality, poor nutrition, early marriage and early pregnancy, and a lack of access to maternal health care services.
 
In an agonizing exercise, we each selected a small set of issues to cover and gave rationales for why we would choose those and not others. From this we were able to articulate some general criteria, such as: the issue has the most impact, is the most difficult to do, is the most innovative. Fortified with this perspective, group members are back home now reviewing each other’s gathered ideas on all the areas the book will cover—women and work, HIV, violence against women, family planning, women with disabilities, girls’ health issues, sexuality, gender, mental health—with a new strategic framework to help assess what is most important to include.
 
We hope to gather again when a first draft of the book is completed, in about a year. Even in this age of relatively easy global communications by email and Skype, the value of gathering in person is undeniable. To be in a circle of committed women is always a powerful experience and we are incredibly grateful to SAR for making this happen.