Latest Equinet Updates

This fifth information sheet in the COVID-19 series summarises information on how COVID-19 has affected working people in the ESA region, and the response by workers, unions, states and others, with recommendations for how to better address the impacts. Nearly a million African workers are estimated to have had COVID-19 in 2020, probably more given the low level of testing. Health workers (HWs), those in crowded or poorly protected workplaces or in crowded accommodation, those in common contact with the public and those in caring roles may be more at risk. Informal, migrant, young, disabled and female workers may be more vulnerable to COVID-related disease. Lockdowns and blocks in supply chains have disrupted key areas of employment, affecting working people’s livelihoods, jobs and mental health, and leading to stigma and social insecurity and falling remittances from African migrants and revenues for social protection. Possible responses include public health measures, including now equitable access and vaccines; workplace infection control; social protection to prevent impoverishment; protection of jobs and wage subsidies. Workers and unions have contributed to these responses, despite the pandemic undermining union operations. The brief outlines recommendations to protect workers and their rights at work, noting that not implementing such measures makes the whole of society vulnerable.

For some time now, people working in the field of health at community level have expressed the need for a toolkit specifically focusing on participatory approaches to working on health. This toolkit was produced in response to this need, drawing on the experiences and knowledge of individuals and institutions working in this field. The toolkit shows how participatory methods can be used to raise community voice, both through health research and by training communities to take effective action and become involved in the health sector. Generally, this toolkit aims to strengthen capacities in researchers, health workers and civil society personnel working at community level to use participatory methods for research, training and programme support. At the end of the course, we hope that the users of the toolkit will have learned and be able to use various methods for participatory approaches to research and training within various areas of work aimed at building people-centred health systems. The toolkit uses experiences from different countries in the east and southern African region.

The countries in eastern and southern Africa and the East African Community are at various stages of enacting laws to address counterfeiting. Substandard and fasified medicines are a problem for public health if they lack the active ingredients that make them effective, or if they are harmful. Yet making quality, safety and efficacy an intellectuual property issue, and defining counterfeiting so widely as to include generic medicines have even greater potential public harm, as they may make these essential medicines available as branded versions, at significantly higher cost. This policy brief draws policy makers attention to the need to ensure that counterfeit laws do not include generic medicines and that falsified medicines are dealt with under public health and not ntellectual propoperty law. It discusses the key issues in these laws and draft laws and how they are likely to affect public health and access to essential medicines in the region.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) Global Code of practice on the international recruitment of health personnel was adopted by the 63rd World Health Assembly in May 2010 in response to the intensifying movement of health workers, especially from low to high income countries. This movement of health workers aggravates inequity, particularly with regard to the number of health workers relative to health need. The WHO Code is a voluntary ethical framework. This policy brief looks at the developments in Sub-Saharan Africa since the adoption of this code with regards to its implementation. It presents the activities required to monitor its implementation and what actions have so far been implemented.