In this blog, Lois – a new PhD student with the GHGP – shares her experiences and reflections on attending a scientific meeting in Malaysia with international research partners as part of the RESPIRE research group. 

Sustainable development and healthy populations go hand in hand. But with patient demand ever increasing, how can countries across the development spectrum ensure their health systems can deliver healthcare for all?

We invited Dr. Francisco Songane, the former minister of health of Mozambique, to speak at our symposium, ‘Disrupting Global Health Narratives: Alternative Perspectives on the World Bank’s Influence on Global Health,’ hosted by the Brocher Foundation near Geneva, Switzerland in January 2019. Drawing on his vast experience working with global health institutions in many different capacities, Dr. Songane gave an important talk about the responsibilities and roles of global health actors and researchers in promoting health for all, and he has generously permitted us to post it on our blog for all to learn from him.

Last week, a few of us global health students and researchers at the University of Edinburgh got together to watch the live-streaming of the Women Leaders in Global Health (WLGH) 2018 Conference held at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. In this post, we present 6 tips on leadership, emerging from this conference.

The rise of new economic powers since the post-1945 creation of the Bretton Woods institutions – including the establishment of the World Bank in 1944 and World Health Organisation (WHO) in 1948 – has caused a paradigm shift in global health. There are growing calls to reform global governance structures to better reflect global realities. What implications do the changing nature of global governance arrangements have for global health diplomacy?

In this post, I reflect on the need to strengthen existing national health information systems in LMICs to collect data on two vital events i.e., birth and death, or in Mark Twain’s words, ‘the two most important days of our life’.

What is human capital? According to a World Bank publication promoted at its recent Spring Meeting, human capital is “measured as the discounted value of earnings over a person’s lifetime” (Lange et al. 2018: 4). In its explicitly economistic nature, “human capital” is not the same as “human development”…

How do we measure the impact of health interventions and how does the measurement of health or of health’s absence impact global health discourse and funding? How is the measuring of health co-constructive of ideas about what health is and what kinds of negotiations are underway in health development in Senegal as the country works towards universal health coverage?

Health policy-related decisions are often made based on global burden of disease estimates, as well as economic framings of disease control and prevention. But how do other social sciences fit into this agenda – and how do they challenge it?