Despite 20 years of democracy, South Africa still suffers from profound health inequalities and gender roles and norms associated with vulnerability to ill-health. Gender inequality influences women’s access to health care and agency to make health-related decisions. This paper explores gender-awareness and inclusivity in organisations that advocate for the right to health in South Africa, and analyses how this knowledge impacts their work. Ten in-depth interviews were conducted with members of The Learning Network for Health and Human Rights (LN), a network of universities and Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) committed to advancing the right to health, but not explicitly gendered in its orientation. The results show that there is a discrepancy in knowledge around gender and gendered power relations between LN members. This suggests that gender is ‘rendered invisible’ within the LN, which impacts the way the LN advocates for the right to health. The authors thus suggest that even organizations that work on health rights of women might be unaware of the possibility of gender invisibility within their organisational structures.
Values, Policies and Rights
Botswana should decriminalise homosexuality and prostitution to prevent the spread of HIV, says ex-President Festus Mogae. Mogae, who heads the Botswana government-backed Aids Council, said it was difficult to promote safe sex when the two practices were illegal. He also called for condoms to be distributed in prisons. His views are controversial as many conservative Batswana frown upon homosexuality and prostitution. Yet Botswana has one of the highest HIV rates in the world - 17% of the population is HIV positive. Mogae asserted that homosexuals were Botswana citizens and entitled to the same rights as heterosexual citizens. He said the government's failure to give prisoners' condoms was worsening the HIV and AIDS pandemic. However, a government spokesman on HIV and AIDS said that homosexuality and prostitution would remain illlegal until the government concluded wide-ranging consultations to see whether there was a need to change the law.
This volume provides an evidence and rights-based approach to monitoring the well-being of children and adolescents in South Africa. Drawing on international precedents, and extensive peer review processes, experts in various fields have developed this holistic set of indicators to enhance the monitoring of the status of children.
This training manual is intended to enhance the role of civil society in promoting and protecting of the right to health under the Constitution. It will play an integral part in ensuring that civil society organisations have the knowledge and skills to hold duty bearers accountable to effective and efficient health service delivery. Schedule Four of the Kenya Constitution creates two levels of governance with distinct functions. The national government is mandated to formulate health policy and manage national referral health facilities while the county government is responsible for delivery of health services at the local level. The civil society groups that are working on health issues must therefore understands the roles and responsibilities of the different actors at both levels if they are to meaningfully engage in national and county processes. The manual is presented in four modules. The first module outlines the constitutional provisions on the right to health and what these provisions mean to the implementation of health as a right. The second module addresses the substance of the right to health including the international standards developed for the implementation of this right. The third module outlines the systems and structures of the devolved government and the role of the different state organs and agencies at national and county level in health service delivery. The fourth module then focuses on the role of the civil society in monitoring the implementation of the right to health. It also highlights the key issues concerning the right to health and outlines the specific responsibilities of civil society in holding each level of government to account for their mandates to deliver on the right to health.
This study looks at how sub-Saharan Africa’s three main HIV and AIDS donors have incorporated gender issues into their policies, and to what extent they have been put into practice and monitored. Although PEPFAR, the Global Fund and MAP have all made high-level commitments to address gender issues in their programming, these commitments have ‘not yet produced concrete and systematic action on the ground’. The study found 61% of people living with HIV in sub-Saharan Africa are women, up from about 33% in the 1980s, and argues that gender inequality seriously undermines efforts to curb the epidemic and has actually fuelled the spread of HIV in the region, making women vulnerable to sexual violence, hindering their ability to have safe sex, and limiting their access to health, education and employment. It urges the three donors to collaborate on gender issues to make the most of their individual strengths and avoid duplication by helping countries establish gender-related goals in their HIV and AIDS responses, and sharing research and knowledge.
Citing a high rate of maternal deaths due to illegal, unsafe abortions, Mozambique policymakers are considering legalising the procedure. The country may eventually become one of only a handful in Africa where abortion is available on demand. The push for the new legislation, officially introduced earlier this year, has come from the Mozambican health ministry, arguing that unsafe abortion is the third leading cause of death among pregnant women in the country. Mozambique has one of the highest maternal death rates in the world.
Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) has called for an investigation by an international humanitarian fact-finding commission into a US airstrike on its hospital in the Afghanistan city of Kunduz and for one of the States, party to the Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions, to invoke it. MSF said the attacks took place despite the fact that it had provided the GPS coordinates of the trauma hospital to Coalition and Afghan military and civilian officials as recently as Tuesday, 29 September. The attack continued for more than 30 minutes after MSF first informed US and Afghan military officials in Kabul and Washington that it was a hospital that was being hit. The International Humanitarian Fact-Finding Commission was established under the Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions and was officially constituted in 1991 to investigate allegations of violations of international humanitarian law. According to the Commission's website, some 76 countries have recognised the Commission, which is based in Bern, but so far, it has not yet been called upon to conduct any investigation. In her remarks to the media, MSF President Liu said that international humanitarian law is not about ‘mistakes'. "It is about intention, facts and why....This was not just an attack on our hospital - it was an attack on the Geneva Conventions. This cannot be tolerated. These Conventions govern the rules of war and were established to protect civilians in conflicts - including patients, medical workers and facilities. They bring some humanity into what is otherwise an inhumane situation."
This Multisectoral Action Framework for Malaria makes a clear case for re-structuring the way countries address malaria. It presents a menu of concrete, implementable processes and actions to transform malaria
responses—from being a concern of the health sector only, towards a coordinated multi-pronged effort that harnesses expertise across a range of sectors and institutions. The Framework calls for action at several levels and in multiple sectors, globally and across inter- and
intra-national boundaries, and by different organizations. It emphasizes complementarity, effectiveness and sustainability, and capitalizes on the potential synergies to accelerate both socio-economic development and malaria control. It involves new interventions as well as putting new life into those that already exist, and coordinates and manages these in new and innovative ways. It is a guide for policymakers and practitioners and a stimulus for innovation.
Muslim clerics from 25 African countries held a five-day population and development meeting in Tanzania's semiautonomous island of Zanzibar, focusing on issues such as HIV/AIDS and gender violence from an Islamic point of view. The participants, from member countries of the Network of African Islamic Faith-based Organisations, are also focusing on social and development problems.
The World Health Organization is establishing the Joint Learning Initiative (JLI) on National and Global Responsibilities for Health to articulate an overarching, coherent framework for sharing the responsibility for health that goes further than the United Nations Millennium Development Goals. The Initiative forges an international consensus around solutions to four critical challenges: defining essential health services and goods; clarifying governments’ obligations to their own country’s inhabitants; exploring the responsibilities of all governments towards the world’s poor; and proposing a global architecture to improve health as a matter of social justice. The first challenge for the JLI is to determine essential health services and goods that every person has a right to expect. The JLI aims to launch a wide participatory process involving all major stakeholders, including international organizations, governments, industry, philanthropists and civil society, and emphasises a bottom-up approach to decision making.