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...

Introduction Healthtech and artificial intelligence (AI) innovation are needed, more than ever, in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. Healthcare systems are being pushed to their limits, and homegrown and innovative ways of delivering healthcare through technology are being developed rapidly. However, turning a blind eye to gender inequities in...

On December 3 we celebrate the International Day of People with Disabilities, and the theme for 2020 is ‘Not all Disabilities are Visible’.  An invisible disability is a physical, mental or neurological condition that is not visible from the outside, that limits a person’s movements, senses, or activities. The very fact that these symptoms...

Following the announcement that BioNTech and Pfizer’s co-developed Covid-19 vaccine candidate is over 90 percent effective,  Morgenbladet, a leading Norwegian weekly, interviewed us about the implications. While celebrating the news, we pointed out that access will be a major challenge for poor countries, and questioned the ethics of the compa...

Decolonisation is not a metaphor and decoloniality is not an end. Rather, it is a means, a segue, a process, a lens with multiple ends. To advance socially just health systems, we argue for global health scholars (and especially us located in postcolonial contexts) to take a political stance on the side of justice. We need to recognise that we h...

It’s been nine months now since the first case of Covid-19 was reported in Kenya. Cases were low in the summer,  but in recent months there has been a steady increase in cases. In November, my country recorded the highest number of cases in a single month (15, 382 till now, with 289 deaths), and just a few weeks ago, Kenya broke its daily reco...

Kent Buse & Anthony Zwi wrote this on behalf of the Reclaiming Comprehensive Public Health Group Responses to the COVID-19 pandemic reflect long-standing tensions in public health between biosecurity- and biomedically-focused approaches and those that address social determinants, facilitate participation and protect human rights. As noted by Lo...

Over these last years, under the leadership of Dr Agnes Soucat, the Health Systems Governance and Financing Department of WHO has been pursuing a multi-pronged strategy for the generation and management of knowledge in its area of work. We embraced the view that health systems are complex – this implies that interventions aiming at improving t...

Last year, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), with its tiny 83,600Km2 of land and a little under 10 million residents, ranked 56th out of 195 countries on the (now somewhat controversial) John’s Hopkins Global Health Security index. The country was labeled as  as ‘more prepared’ in the face of disaster – in between ‘least prepared’ and ...