Malaria remains a persistent global health crisis, with Africa bearing the greatest burden. With a staggering 95% of (global) malaria cases and 96% of deaths, the disease poses a disproportionate burden on the continent. Despite significant strides in prevention and treatment, malaria still claims countless lives, underscoring the urgent need fo...

This week’s Fifth Global Forum on Human Resources for Health in Geneva concluded with a powerful message from Dr. Tedros, the Director General of the World Health Organization (WHO), reminding us that health and care workers deserve more than just thanks. “They deserve quality education and training, they deserve safe working conditions, the...

Every country in the world is responsible for providing services, security and sustaining wellbeing for all its people. As a consequence, all nations have policies that focus on ensuring the provision of healthcare services for their population, even if in many countries that remains a work in progress. A well-functioning health care system is c...

Last year, on June 19, Colombia elected its first leftist president, committed to sustainable peace and tackling social and economic inequality and corruption, in a historic result. The stewardship of the country’s health system, headed by the Ministry of Health (MoH), was henceforth going to be presided over by civil and political forces root...

In emergencies, women and girls are often at particular risk. Response agencies have recorded this pattern during disasters such as the 2015 Nepal earthquake, the COVID-19 pandemic, the Ukraine war, the 2022 floods in Pakistan, and now the Turkey-Syria earthquake. According to the UN Refugee agency, UNHCR’s latest data released in mid-2022, 10...

As Africa navigates the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, it faces a growing number of health threats.  Recently, during the opening plenary of the biannual Africa Health Agenda International Conference (AHAIC) in Kigali, Rwanda, Dr. Githinji Gitahi, the Global Chief Executive Officer of Amref Health Africa outlined “the four C’s” facing t...

The weekly International Health Policies (IHP) newsletter is a flagship knowledge management activity of the IHP network, funded by the Belgian Directorate-General for Development Cooperation and Humanitarian Aid (DGD)  and produced out of ITM Antwerp. The IHP network aims to “empower committed groups of global health experts based in the Glob...

As we see women taking up leadership positions around us, we often feel that we have come a long way in terms of achieving gender equality! It is only when one sees the startling facts around female representation that one realizes how much work remains to be done.  Women hold only a quarter of global health leadership positions, while 75% of he...

Community engagement is key to the sustained success of  public health and social measures (PHSMs) in response to outbreaks. As witnessed during the Covid pandemic (among others), public health and social measures are a key strategy to reduce the transmission of pathogens with epidemic or pandemic potential. The pandemic also reminded us of the ...