The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has in 2004 developed guidelines as a practical tool to assist States to both understand and fulfill their obligations on the right to food. The guidelines were adopted in September 2004. This report and fact-finding mission by Rights and Democracy in collaboration with Foodfirst Information and Action Network in 2006 is an effort to apply the FAO Guidelines in a practical context in Malawi and in doing so, to illustrate the distinct advantages a human rights framework provides for policy and program development in relation to food security. The report identifies a number of legal, policy, institutional and economic constraints to the right to food and makes recommendations to address these.
Values, Policies and Rights
The document recaps what it means to apply a holistic rights-based lens in development practice, be it in health, in education or in any other sector. It directs us to the corresponding behaviors one would expect to see enacted in health, education or any other development work when applying such an optic. The points within the document present when and under what conditions the adoption of an explicit rights-based approach is more likely to make a lasting difference to equity.
According to this article, the International Monetary Fund is deepening poverty in developing countries, especially for women who make up 70% of the world’s poor. By means of ‘structural adjustment programmes’ (SAPs), it pushes for lower tariffs and cuts in government programmes such as welfare and education. IMF-mandated government austerity measures may require cutting public sector jobs, which disproportionately impact women, as women hold most of the lower-skilled public sector jobs, so are often the first to be cut. As social programmes like caregiving are slashed, women are expected to take on additional domestic responsibilities that further limit their access to education or other jobs. In exchange for borrowing US$5.8 billion from the IMF and World Bank, Tanzania agreed to impose fees for health services, which led to fewer women seeking hospital deliveries or post-natal care and naturally, higher rates of maternal death. In Zambia, the imposition of SAPs led to a significant drop in girls’ enrollment in schools and a spike in ‘subsistence sex’ as a way for young women to continue their educations, the authors note.
This paper suggests that the extent to which conflict restricts women’s freedom of movement depends on a number of factors, including the stage of conflict, whether the women are displaced, whether they are directly or indirectly affected by the conflict and the cultural norms of the conflict-affected area. In times of political, economic and social uncertainty, there is a strong tendency to revert to traditional values, which appear to offer protection for women and girls, but which restrict their mobility. Some of the negative impacts of conflict on women‘s health and education include: lowered access to reproductive health care facilities; lack of access to education because of conflict, household and domestic tasks or cultural norms and higher teenage pregnancy rates. Girls who are disabled, disfigured or severely mentally affected by the crisis are also likely to be kept at home.
This editorial discusses a collection of papers examining gender across a range of health policy and systems contexts, from access to services, governance, health financing, and human resources for health. The papers interrogate differing health issues and core health systems functions using a gender lens. Together they produce new knowledge on the multiple impacts of gender on health experiences and demonstrate the importance of gender analyses and gender sensitive interventions for promoting well-being and health systems strengthening. The findings from these papers collectively show how gender intersects with other axes of inequity within specific contexts to shape experiences of health and health seeking within households, communities and health systems; illustrate how gender power relations affect access to important resources; and demonstrate that gender norms, poverty and patriarchy interplay to limit women’s choices and chances both within household interactions and within the health sector. The authors note that health systems researchers have a responsibility to promote the incorporation of gender analyses into their studies in order to inform more strategic, effective and equitable health systems interventions, programmes, and policies. Responding to gender inequitable systems, institutions, and services in this sector requires an ‘all hands-on deck’ approach. They note that it is not possible to claim to take a ‘people-centred approach’ to health systems if the status quo continues.
The Initiative for Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights in Health Sector Reforms is an international research, capacity building and advocacy project (also known as the Rights and Reforms Initiative). It aims to promote health sector reforms that are conducive to implementing the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development's (ICPD) Programme of Action, are driven by in-country actors, and are responsive to the needs of the people of the country, especially poor women. The main purpose of the Initiative is to strengthen understanding amongst activists and decision-makers of the role of global social and economic changes and specifically of health sector reforms (HSR) in facilitating or undermining efforts to achieve sexual and reproductive rights in health policies and programmes.
Fundamental revisions to the International Health Regulations in 2005 were meant to herald a new era of global health security and cooperation. Yet, 10 years later, the International Health Regulations face criticism, particularly after the west African Ebola epidemic. Several high-level panels are reviewing the International Health Regulations' functions and urging reforms. The Global Health Security Agenda, a multilateral partnership focused on preventing, detecting, and responding to natural, accidental, or intentional disease outbreaks, has similar capacity building aims, but operates largely outside the International Health Regulations.
In the last two decades, there have been a plethora of South African policies to promote safety. However, indications suggest that the policy response to violence is not coherently formulated, comprehensive, or evenly implemented. This study examines selected South African national legislative instruments in terms of their framing and definition of violence and its typology, vulnerable populations, and prevention. This study comprises a directed content analysis of selected legislative documents from South African ministries mandated to prevent violence and its consequences or tasked with the prevention of key contributors to violence. The legislative documents recognised the high levels of violence, confirmed the prioritisation of selected vulnerable groups, especially women, children, disabled persons, and rural populations, and above all drew on criminological perspectives to emphasise tertiary prevention interventions. There is a policy focus on the protection and support of victims and the prosecution of perpetrators, but near absent recognition of men as victims. The authors argue for the policy framework to be broadened from primarily criminological and prosecutorial perspectives to include public health contributions, and to enlarge the conceptions of vulnerability to include men alongside other vulnerable groups.
A coalition of civil society organisations and academics is initiating a Joint Action and Learning Initiative on National and Global Responsibilities for Health (JALI) to research key questions involving health rights and responsibilities, with the goal of securing a global health agreement and supporting social mobilisation around the right to health. A Framework Convention on Global Health would inform post-Millennium Development Goal global health commitments, be grounded in the right to health, help resolve unconscionable global health inequities, and ensure universal health coverage. JALI seeks to clarify the health services to which everyone is entitled under the right to health, the national and global responsibilities for securing this right, and global governance structures that can realise these responsibilities and close major health inequities.
The right to health is a fundamental human right which is recognized in international and regional human rights systems. The African Human Rights System is also duly recognized the right to health. Although recognizing the right in the human rights instrument is important, the meaningful protection of the right needs appropriate and consistent interpretation and adequate implementation mechanisms. This article scrutinizes the Justiciability and Enforcement of the right to health in the African Human Rights System. Based on analysis of relevant African Human Rights Instruments, literatures and cases of African Commission, the author argues that the justiciability of the right to health in African Human Rights System is upheld. Regarding its enforcement, the article argued that there are relevant institutional frameworks in African human rights systems and African political architecture. Hence, the enforcement of the right to health falls squarely in most of these institutions’ mandate.