Africa S Health Challenges

Health rights litigation is still an emerging phenomenon in Africa, despite the constitutions of many African countries having provisions to advance the right to health. Litigation can provide a powerful tool not only to hold governments accountable for failure to realise the right to health, but also to empower the people to seek redress for the violation of this essential right. With contributions from activists and scholars across Africa, the collection includes a diverse range of case studies throughout the region, demonstrating that even in jurisdictions where the right to health has not been explicitly guaranteed, attempts have been made to litigate on this right. The collection focusses on understanding the legal framework for the recognition of the right to health, the challenges people encounter in litigating health rights issues and prospects of litigating future health rights cases in Africa. The book also takes a comparative approach to litigating the right to health before regional human rights bodies. This book will be valuable reading to scholars, researchers, policymakers, activists and students interested in the right to health.

This edited book includes new policy-relevant research on women’s health issues in Africa. Scholars explore critical topics from different disciplinary traditions using a variety of research methodologies and data sources. The contributors include African scholars with in-depth knowledge of their home contexts, who can furnish nuanced interpretations of local health issues and trends; international researchers who bring vigorous comparative viewpoints; emerging scholars adding to scientific knowledge; and more established researchers with a deep global knowledge of women’s health issues. The range of women’s health issues is vast, including the HIV epidemic and its impacts; domestic violence; the persistence of homebirths; and abortion. In addition, the book investigates emerging health concerns such as CVDs and cancers. Readers will learn that, while old health issues have persisted and assumed new dimensions, newer concerns have materialized and are gaining momentum. The inability of health systems to tackle these issues complicates matters in Africa, creating a sense of desperation that can only be successfully confronted through strong political will and strategic planning, grounded in further research. This book was originally published as several special issues of Health Care for Women International.

This book focuses on Africa’s challenges, achievements, and failures over the past several centuries using an interdisciplinary approach that combines theory and fact and evidence-based practices and interventions in public health, and argues that most of the health problems in Africa are not a result of scarce or lack of resources, but of the misconceived and misplaced priorities that have left the continent behind every other on the globe in terms of health, education, and equitable distribution of opportunities and access to (quality) health as agreed by the United Nations member states at Alma-Ata in 1978.

This volume addresses the ideational and policy-oriented challenges of Africa’s health governance due to voluntary and involuntary cross-border migration of people and diseases in a growing 'mobile Africa'. The collected set of specialized contributions in this volume examines how national and regional policy innovation can address the competing conception of sovereignty in dealing with Africa’s emerging healthcare problems in a fast-paced, interconnect world.

Most accounts of health and healthcare in Africa are written by foreigners. African Health Leaders: Making Change and Claiming the Future redresses the balance. Written by Africans, who have themselves led improvements in their own countries, the book discusses the creativity, innovation and leadership that has been involved tackling everything from HIV/AIDs, to maternal, and child mortality and neglected tropical diseases. It celebrates their achievements and shows how, over three generations, African health leaders are creating a distinctively African vision of health and health systems. The book reveals how African Health Leaders are claiming the future - in Africa, but also by sharing their insights and knowledge globally and contributing fully to improving health throughout the world. It illustrates how African leadership can enable foreign agencies and individuals working in Africa to avoid all those misunderstandings and misinterpretations of culture and context which lead to wasted efforts and frustrated hopes. African Health Leaders challenges Africans to do more for themselves; build on success; tackle weak governance, corrupt systems and low expectations and claim the future. It sets out what Africa needs from the rest of the world in the spirit of global solidarity - not primarily in aid, but through investment, collaboration, partnership and co-development. It concludes with a vision for improvement based on three foundations: an understanding that 'health is made at home'; the determination to offer access to health services for everyone; and an insistence on the pursuit of quality.

The closure of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in 2015 prompted the need for a book of this kind. An interdisciplinary group of global health scholars contribute to the understanding of the emerging and fast-growing problem of the dual burden of communicable and non-communicable diseases (NCDs) in Africa. This book is timely, as the international community has moved from the MDGs to adopt the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as the blueprint for a new human development agenda. Contributions and case studies are situated in the revised Epidemiologic and Nutrition Transition Model to capture the current situation, referencing communicable and NCDs on the African continent. The case studies encapsulated aim to help minimize negative health outcomes and improve population health, well-being, and equity in the future. This book will be significant in policy circles to assist international organizations, governments, and United Nations agencies. It aims to chart the future for health in Africa in light of recently adopted SDGs. This book is also a useful complementary reader for global public health related courses.

The challenges to better health services in Africa are well known: Africa lags behind all regions of the world, including other developing regions, on all indicators of better health. A recent report from the World Health Organisation for instance shows that while Africa has 20% of the world's sick people, it has only 4% of its healthcare workers - many of them vulnerable to the high mortality rate associated with malaria and notably the AIDS epidemic. The state of investment in healthcare infrastructure is also grossly inadequate as is the efficiency of healthcare delivery. But does this need to be so? What factors are responsible for this unacceptable state of affairs? Contributors to the volume examine the evolution of healthcare services in Africa, the ongoing national, regional and continental efforts to improve the delivery of healthcare in the continent, and the direct and indirect obstacles militating against the maturation of the services and their efficient delivery. The contributors - all distinguished experts in the field, - so provide powerful personal insights and lessons learned in their current or previous work in the health sector in Africa. Some of the themes covered include clinical care and centers of excellence, healthcare finance and resource mobilization, primary health care systems and community health and preventive care and risk reduction in health. From their analyses and experience the authors articulate strategies and solutions on how to improve the quality of health services and health outcomes in the continent. ____________________________________ Dr. Chinua Akukwe is the Chairman of the Technical Advisory Board of the Africa Center for Health and Human Security, George Washington University Medical Center, Washington, DC., USA. He is an adjunct professor of global health and also an adjunct professor of preventive and community health at the school of public health, George Washington University. He is also a member of the Board of Directors of the Constituency for Africa, Washington, DC. He previously served as the Vice Chairman of the National Council for International Health, now known as the Global Health Council Washington, DC, the largest voluntary international health organization in the world. Dr. Akukwe, who is also the Chairman of the Board of Directors of the newly established Africa Center for Epidemiology and Diseases Economics Research, Abuja, Nigeria, has written extensively on HIV/AIDS, health and development issues in Africa. He is the author of two recent books on Africa: Don't Let them Die: HIV/AIDS, TB, Malaria and the Healthcare Crisis in Africa and Beyond the Rhetoric: Essays on Africa's Development Challenges. He is also a co-author of a recent book on AIDS Orphans in Africa and their Grandparents. Dr Akukwe developed the communicable diseases guidelines for the African Development Bank. He also developed the strategic framework and plan of action for achieving universal access to treatments for HIV/AIDS, TB and Malaria for the Africa Union's (AU) Commission of African Heads of State during the Abuja 2006 Special Summit on HIV/AIDS, TB and Malaria. The Strategic Framework for Action document was approved by the African Council of Health Ministers at its April 2007 continental summit in Johannesburg, South Africa. Dr. Akukwe is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine, London and a Fellow of the American College of Epidemiology. He is also a Senior Fellow on Global Health at the National Medical Association, Washington, DC.

This publication is the first to focus on the health of the 738 million people living in the 46 countries of the WHO African Region. Drawing on a comprehensive range of the latest regional health statistics, the report discusses the key public health and development challenges facing the continent, as well looking in more detail at the issues of maternal and child health; infectious diseases including HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria; health problems that are usually associated with developed countries, such as diabetes and hypertension, and other noncommunicable conditions such as mental illness and injuries; and the environmental causes of ill-health including pollution and armed conflict. The report explores the treatment, diagnostic and preventive methods that work in Africa and highlights the public health success stories that can serve as models for others in the continent. It finds that stronger health systems are the key to solving Africa's health problems and these can only achieved by strengthening governments' stewardship role in health, building on the lessons learnt from successful health-care interventions, and through closer collaboration between all partners.