One year ago, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon launched the Global Strategy for Women’s and Children’s Health. So one year on, what’s been done and what still has to be done? According to the secretary general, we are delivering “on all fronts”, and figures published just hours before the Every Woman Every Child event to mark the anniversary seem to back up his belief.

Italian AfGH partners have been hitting the campaign trail to promote Health Heroes, together with a wide coalition of partners. Earlier this month, we held a Health Heroes exhibition at Rome’s Auditorium Parco della Musica, which opened on 13 July to coincide with a concert by Elton John, a well known and active supporter of [...]

With preparations for the Busan forum intensifying over the coming months, AfGH has launched its most recent report on the meaningful participation of civil society organisations (CSOs) in the health sector. The report is based on case studies carried out in three countries – El Salvador, Mozambique and Nepal – where AfGH assessed the level [...]

The Open Forum on CSO Effectiveness has opened its second and final Global Assembly today in Siem Reap, Cambodia. About two-hundred CSOs from more than 70 countries gathered for a three-day conference in the city nearby the famous Angkor temples, to approve the Global framework for CSO development effectiveness.  The framework, based on the Istanbul [...]

Ever wondered what working for a European NGO network is really like? In our “Critical Story of Change”, AfGH reflects on life over the past five years – where the network’s come from to where it is today – highlighting some of the challenges faced along the way.

The Second Global Forum on Human Resources for Health in Bangkok has now closed. Grand statements on progress made to the Kampala Declaration and the efforts to do more have been made. Civil society has demanded more. But in large part this was a meeting of experts within a sector talking to themselves. Debating minor [...]

To mark Human Rights Day (10 December), Action for Global Health and ActionAid India have launched a new video which shows how communities of a remote area of Orissa in south-eastern India stand up for their right to health. India is a vast country with diverse culture, traditions and government structures, and its growing population already [...]

Yesterday, the AfGH team attended the official UN side event “No Health Workforce. No Health MDGs. Is that acceptable?” When you look at Malawi – where there is one nurse per 4000 inhabitants – the answer is easy: no, it is not. At the event Michael Anderson, from DIFID, talked broadly about all the helpful [...]

With a stable government, and health a specific priority, Tanzania is almost certainly considered a ‘darling’ of foreign aid. Before the visit, I’d read about some of the country’s recent successes in improving its health indicators: rates of malaria and tuberculosis have all declined while immunisations and child survival have gone up. But despite the [...]