Earlier this month,  World Breastfeeding Week was celebrated from 1st to 7th August 2023 with the theme “closing the Gap, Support for all.” Breastfeeding is essential for both infant health and survival. Breastmilk provides ideal nutrition, is clean and safe, and contains antibodies that protect against many common childhood diseases. Additi...

Two public health professionals share their experience of going through, and successfully ‘lifting off’ from the 2023 India cohort of the WomenLift Health India Leadership Journey. The State of Working India 2023 report shows that the health and social sector’s women’s workforce has steadily increased in the past two decades. As per the repo...

Approximately 30% of maternal deaths in Pakistan are attributable to the second delay in the ‘Three Delays Model’ ( i.e. delay in the decision to seek care; delay in arriving at a health facility; delay in receiving adequate care at the facility). Many women who cannot reach primary care facilities have to deliver at home. In complicated cas...

In last week’s IHP newsletter intro, Kristof wondered  what “the real story” is. Because in the past few weeks, I too felt really delusional, I decided to go for a reality check – what, indeed, is the real story? Phenomenological accounts of delusions suggest that delusions are not nonsense, but more adequately understood as a different ...

Six years are left to meet the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a ringing bell for the upcoming High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF), taking place at the UN Headquarters, in New York, from 8 to 17 July 2024. In the most recent Sustainable Development Report 2024 by the UN Sustainable Development S...

Our surroundings undoubtedly affect our health, shape our routines, and ultimately impact our lives and long-term health outcomes. Recent research highlights how various neighborhood characteristics impact physical and mental health, and this both at individual and population level. As our understanding of these connections and the underlying bi...

In the busy hallway of one of the health centers in the Amhara region of Ethiopia, I encountered Melat, a middle-aged woman whose tired eyes revealed the weight of her troubles. Despite living with diabetes for years, Melat’s understanding of self-management was rudimentary at best. Like many others in her neighborhood, she relied on a few presc...

If you followed last week’s 77th World Health Assembly (WHA) – the WHO’s governing body composed of its 194 member states – through press release headlines, it was a historic success. WHO’s Director-General Dr. Tedros closed the week by stating WHA77 had been a “victory for multilateralism”. “Landmark” resolutions were passed on ...

Although it’s difficult to compare for me, the 77th World Health Assembly (WHA77) has a unique character. It is driven by a kind of pressure, gentle but eloquent. This pressure, aside from the declarations of civil society and frantic social media activity of many actors present in Geneva, can be seen and felt in the gestures, the looks, and t...