Three years ago I was working as a medical doctor in one of the poorest states in Northern Nigeria, with sky-high maternal and child death rates, and even higher rates of preventable disease. My pediatric clinic was the only source of formal and free health care for thousands of indigent children in the city and… [ More ]
Twenty-four years ago, in 1989, leaders of the United Nations (UN) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) named July 11th World Population Day. This annual event was designed to mobilize the international community around the challenges of rapid population growth. The event was originally inspired by the fearful realization that the human population was… [ More ]
On June 17, 2013, the One Million Community Health Workers Campaign together with UNICEF, Save the Children, the MDG Health Alliance, and frog design launched a blog to share updates from the Backpack PLUS project: http://chwplus.tumblr.com/. The Backpack PLUS project is a multi-phase initiative intended to develop a set of solutions that empowers community health… [ More ]
May 24, 2013: AFRICAN UNION SUMMIT, ADDIS ABABA: In an effort to broadly expand the reach of health care services in sub-Saharan Africa, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) will contribute $750,000 to the One Million Community Health Workers Campaign. The funding will be used to create a new online “Operations Room” that will track the scale-up of community… [ More ]
Better access to healthcare starts with improving health literacy. In areas with too many patients and too few doctors people suffer or die for lack of information, rather than for lack of medication. In such a setting health information is crucial, but this must be in the language of the user, not of the author…. [ More ]