Field-workers are the anchors of any large-scale field-based research, especially when there are house-to-house visits for anthropometry, symptom-screening for diseases, and counselling. Their contribution to these studies cannot be more emphasized. Researchers look at data they bring, try, and make sense of the lives and diseases of the research participants, report, publish, present in […]
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Visa discrimination: moving beyond global health
Visa discrimination has recently become a major topic in global health circles. This is following a spate of discriminatory policies in 2022, which specifically targeted African health professionals being denied visas to global health conferences in the Global North. A recent article in BMJ detailed such cases leading to greater calls for hosting such […]
India’s rapid urbanization demands healthy urban planning: an opportunity to revive the WHO healthy cities approach?
India has been transitioning from rural to quasi-urban due to rapid urbanization over the last two decades and is expected to continue in the coming years. It is estimated that 43.2% of India’s population, i.e., 675 million people, will reside in Urban conglomerates by 2035 (UN-Habitat 2022). While urbanization has provided economic growth and […]
No visa, No worries! Making global health conferences accessible for all
Imagine you are attending a panel held by the largest conference in your field and none of the panelists show up. This was the scene at AIDS 2022, a conference held in Montreal this past July, by the biggest AIDS advocacy organization – the International AIDS Society (IAS). The scene was captured in a […]
Should Global Health institutions apply what they research, teach and advise on?
Essential workers at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) won a brave campaign to be insourced, after keeping the School safe throughout the pandemic. It will be effective on 01 August 2022. Since the insourcing announcement was made, LSHTM has been reticent to negotiate their salary with the workers and to […]
Response to open letter on insourcing at LSHTM
This is a response to the ‘Open letter to London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine’ posted on the BMJ Global Health Blog on 11 July 2022. We are surprised and disappointed that members of the LSHTM community have put their names to a publication without first checking the factual accuracy and validity […]
Open letter to London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine
The following is an open letter calling the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine’s (LSHTM) Senior Management to meet essential workers’ demands of fair treatment and pay, and to ask for the immediate annulation of disciplinary sanctions faced by some workers engaged in union activities and campaigns. Dear Professor Liam Smeeth, and Senior […]
The thin line between lobbying and corruption: health advocacy
What is corruption? What image comes to mind when you see the word corruption? I was born and raised in Nigeria and I associate corruption with Ghana must go bags, agbada, bullion vans, and animals swallowing money before vanishing. Lobbying never comes to mind. Lobbying conjures images of placards, campaigns for social issues and […]
For good “Global Health”, words matter
Words inspire us. They shape our culture. They have the power to divide us. When using alternative words to describe something it is not, we either promote or demote its importance. And thus, we inflate or deflate its actual power or value; sometimes intentionally, other times not. Fortunately, a group of leading scholars in […]
Charting the rise of Family MUAC: equipping families across the world with the tools to identify wasting at home
Globally, wasting treatment services admit over 5 million children on a yearly basis, providing lifesaving therapeutic treatment to these high-risk children. Yet only one third of children with wasting receive treatment. Limited geographic coverage means that treatment is just not available in many places. Scaling-up services within countries is essential to ensure that treatment […]