decolonization
April 28, 2025
Barred from Healing: Denial of Qualified Medical Care Deepens Humanitarian Crises
This article is written in Arabic and English. For the English version, please see below. في مناطق النزاع حول العالم، يمكن أن يكون الوصول إلى المهنيين الطبيين المؤهلين هو الفارق بين الحياة والموت. ولا يوجد مكان يتجلى فيه هذا الأمر أكثر من غزة، حيث أدى الحصار المتعمد على العاملين في مجال الرعاية الصحية الماهرين إلى…
March 21, 2025
Re-imagining foreign aid
Farah Stockman in her NY Times editorial decries the chaos and devastation from cuts in US foreign aid, but also calls for re-imagining a foreign aid that addresses serious flaws inherent in the current forms of aid. We know that local groups (especially under-funded government health systems) are far more cost-effective and attuned to what…
January 23, 2025
Moving Beyond Allyship in the Decolonization of Global Health
The University of Washington School of Public Health’s Alison Wiyeh, MD, MSc (PhD student in the Department of Epidemiology with a concentration in public policy and management) and Ferdinand Mukumbang, PhD, MS (Assistant Professor in the Department of Global Health) recently published a correspondence in The Lancet, “Global South leaders should strengthen strategic capacity“. The…
October 1, 2024
IMF imposing austerity on new Sri Lanka government
The new wave of IMF-imposed austerity measures is now reaching Sri Lanka, and their newly elected center-left government is challenging the usual IMF terms of social welfare cuts, rise in the VAT, and other measures that have the effect of doubling the cost of living and reducing the real wages by half for those that…
June 8, 2024
Decolonizing must challenge globalized systems of wealth extraction and profiteering.
The authors of a February 2024 Bulletin of the World Health Organization article call for global health actors to challenge current forms of corporate and financialized colonialism that operate through globalized systems of wealth extraction and profiteering. They note that most of the current narrative on decolonization focuses on correcting power imbalances between health actors…
January 27, 2024
Tim Schwab & “The Bill Gates Problem” Town Hall Seattle Podcast
Tim Schwab, author of the recently published “The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning with the myth of the good billionaire,” headlined a Seattle Town Hall event in December 2024 sponsored by the Community Alliance for Global Justice. In this podcast of the event, Tim explains how Bill Gates’ uses his foundation as a vehicle for unaccountable…
October 6, 2023
Could you patent the sun? How vaccine patent waivers would save lives
The world had the chance to truly treat COVID-19 as a common problem and respond to it in an equitable and just manner. At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, politicians, mainstream media and celebrities in the West declaring the disease the “great equalizer” – implying that this novel virus would affect everyone regardless of their position, wealth,…
September 19, 2023
Hollow Promises and True Adversaries
Decolonization in global health has gained popularity as a trendy topic, but the language of equity and justice falls short when it comes to practice. Richard Horton’s “Offline: The case for global health” (Lancet, May 2023) pushes us to struggle against deeper issues in our field, including power and money imbalances, unearned privileges, racism, and…
September 2, 2023
Fossil Fuel Shackles: How Wealthy Nations Hook Developing Ones
Introduction In the realm of global environmental justice, a disconcerting phenomenon has gained prominence in recent times: the entrapment of impoverished nations by their wealthier counterparts into a relentless dependence on fossil fuels. (1) This practice, though obscured by economic negotiations, perpetuates a cycle of environmental degradation and inequality. By examining pertinent examples and evidence,…
August 11, 2023
Are we training students to be white saviors in global health?
Ananya Tina Banerjee and co-authors just published an excellent piece in The Lancet on white saviorism in global health. They remind us that global health leadership and power continues to be dominated by the global north – and that 85% of all global health organizations are headquartered in Europe and North America. They point out…
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