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 to...

This year, International Women’s Day (IWD) is a mixed one for us Canadians – in the world of global health policy and practice, we are heralded as a beacon for global health leadership on women, and for highlighting Canadian women’s leadership in global health. The ethos of feminism espoused by the current government was demonstrated at t...

In evidence-informed policy-making, there has been an increasing focus on involving those who are potentially affected by policies in the policy-making process. While at the Knowledge to Policy Center (K2P) (American University of Beirut, Lebanon), I spoke to Rana Saleh (Advocacy and Evidence Lead Specialist at K2P) on her work on citizen engage...

Suddenly women are driving scooters everywhere in Mussoorie, the small North Indian town where I work with a local non-profit organisation. This change in the gender norms of vehicle driving means that I have to leave for work ten minutes earlier than I did a couple of years back. Two years ago, children went to school by foot, or riding with th...

When global health policy wonks talk about the financing pressures of the World Health Organization, there is a certain kind of despondency. Many of the 194 of its member states do not want to cough up more money to enable WHO to do what it must. Not only that, they also want WHO to do more than it does. As a result, it has forced the instituti...

For over a century various physicians, philosophers and scholars have used medicine or medical science to define health. This has contributed to the emerging issues around medicalisation of human experience and changed the dynamics around control and power within the health system. While modern biomedicine has made immense strides in medicine an...

Not every day we attend conferences that in their announcement declare global health to be “only the newest iteration of what was formerly international health, tropical medicine and colonial medicine”. Which is precisely what attracted this grey-haired whitey – working in what is still called an Institute of Tropical Medicine – to the “De...

The history of the field of global health is always traced back to tropical medicine, an earlier discipline started by former Western empires. Generally, the focus of tropical medicine was the study of infectious diseases prevalent in colonies in the tropics. The purpose was to find measures to protect the colonizers from acquiring these disease...

When the Tedros administration assumed office in 2017, there was some apprehension in certain sections of the global health community, about the extent to which WHO would protect and pursue the contentious issue of access to medicines. Less than two years on, one can be fairly convinced that this administration is serious in leading from the fr...