Once every twenty years the United Nations brings together thousands of participants from member states to garner and secure political commitment, review past commitments, address and identify challenges towards sustainable urban development. This week, Quito (Ecuador) played host to the UN’s third conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban D...

As health systems researchers and policymakers we need to remember that the word “gender” is not synonymous with “woman.” Gender analysis is about exploring how gendered power relations (eg. norms, roles, access to resources, decision-making) affect differences in health system experiences, access, and outcomes for men, women, and people of othe...

German chancellor Merkel’s slogan “Wir schaffen das” (we can do it) was first heard in 2015 after the onset of what has been called the greatest challenge of post-war Germany:  the migration of hundreds of thousands of forcibly displaced individuals (mostly from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan) over the last year into the country. While this ...

There has been a lot of attention on women’s maternal health, not least because of the MDG targets, and this will continue with the SDGs. But how much of this work should be focused on bringing men into the world of maternal health?  At one level, men are often the ones who control women’s access to health seeking and health care. At anot...

Last week, I participated in three consecutively-held global health seminars which focused on the changing nature of health cooperation and the increasing prominence of global health in international politics. Coincidentally, all meetings referred to (the need for) a paradigm shift in global health and the transformative change required to attai...

Over the past few weeks a couple of thematic discussions were organized for the new cohort of Emerging Voices. One of them focused on resilience, the resilience “discourse” and resilient health systems more in particular. After going through a few background readings (including Kruk et al (2015), Kutzin & Sparkes (2016),  Gebauer (2016), am...

The much-anticipated report by the United Nations (UN) High-Level Panel on Access to Medicines went public on 14 September. Hopes that its forward-looking recommendations could speedily succeed are threatened, however, by the load of conflicting issues still on the table worldwide.   The United Nations High-Level Panel on Access to Medicines ...

Women make up the bulk of the healthcare workforce but so few are in the top leadership roles. The role of women in leadership, or rather the lack of women in leadership positions and its impact on health policies, is indeed one which we must continue to question. What are the implications of having so few women at the top? How do we encourage t...

Over the weekend, Laurie Garrett rightly noted that the upcoming WHO DG (s)election might be the first one that will also play out on social media. Still, she acknowledged social media probably won’t have much impact on the outcome, as  the “MOH vote is based on deals not tweets” .  Assuming that social media might just have a tiny bit o...