It’s that time where in South Africa and the Southern hemisphere, at least, there are blossoms everywhere and a spring in our step literally! Not to be corny, but this analogy does resonate with the Emerging Voices (#EV2018) distance learning phase which is the first stage to getting that health-system-spring-in-your-step, thoughts and actions...

In my later years as a medical student, I was fortunate to take calls in a local clinic in the neighborhood of my medical school – University of Buea, Cameroon. Still struggling to finetune the clinical skills I had learned through my training, making sense of clinical presentation of diseases, prescription of medicines and para-clinical inves...

Global research, large scale innovation and socio-economic development have become a product of collaborations, partnerships and networks. This applies not just to collaborations between individual scientists but also and especially to institutions, organisations and industry. Without effective collaboration, science is stifled, and impact on he...

In the summer of 1978, Grease, the cult movie opened in theatres, and some weeks later, Louis Joy Brown – the first test tube baby – was born in England. These two facts were momentous enough in themselves, but only a few months later, something else would join them in the annals of global history, and no, it wasn’t Godzilla. In the autumn of ...

This summer I took up IHP’s suggestion and read Paul Mason’s ‘PostCapitalism: a Guide to Our Future’. That triggered my interest in Ilias Alami’s ‘On the terrorism of money and national policy-making in emerging capitalist economies’. My “summer of Marxism” provided me with a few clues on why investing in health and the health ...

“I’m standing in a place people call the playground. My eyes are hurting from the brightness of the sun…I keep my head down and twitch my eyes. The sounds around me are hard to distinguish from one another, I hear people’s voices; I hear children crying; I can hear and feel the vibration of the wind every time the swing next to me goes up ...

Each year, 5.6 million children die before their fifth birthday, while millions more fail to reach their full development potential. While global strategies like Integrated Management of Childhood Illness (IMCI) and integrated Community Case Management (iCCM) have contributed to significant reductions in child deaths, what can we learn from 20 y...

This week the AIDS2018 Conference in Amsterdam kicked off with an explicit focus on diversity, key populations and young people. AIDS conferences are always a bit of a celebration, bringing together scientists and activists, politicians and social society, donors and implementers in an invigorating combination of evidence, practice and protest. ...

Health financing is one of the six building blocks of a health system, and health insurance is key to making progress with UHC, yet it continues to be a major challenge in the Nigerian health system. It is uncertain that Nigeria will achieve Universal Health Coverage (UHC) by 2030 as a target of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The Nati...