Right to Health and Health Care Campaign

Read and download the Right to Health and Health Care Campaign (RTHHC) reports:

• Uruguay (in English), also see here.
• Cameroon (in French)
• Togo (in French)

Inspired by the success of the First Annual South Los Angeles Health and Human Rights Conference last June, PHM-US  is helping to launch a Bay Area health and human rights learning circle. We will meet for several months to use articles, personal experience, and other forms of media to learn more about the health and human rights approach, hoping to build and strengthen a community of allies.

It is time again to give an update where the campaign has gone since the middle of last year.

Kenya has joined the campaign and will be funded shortly. Djibouti has sent a plan and is reworking its budget. Togo got funding to hold its workshop to present the assessment results and prepare an action plan. Cameroun has sent a plan for the same workshop and is reworking its budget for that. Benin has promised a plan for the workshop shortly. Morocco did an assessment of the RTH --without PHM funding-- and sent us a copy. Ecuador worked on RTH wording for the new national Constitution. India is successfully carrying out a community based monitoring of the RTH. Guatemala has completed the assessment and we are expecting the report. Liberia recently contacted us very preliminarily.

Several countries have now completed the assessment and we have some campaign reports that do not live up to what a rights-based report should be. From our experience so far, we have seen that we do not offer enough human rights training to our members; following the assessment guidelines seems not to be enough for upcoming campaign implementers to prepare reports with recommendations based on HR principles of social mobilization.

The Right to Health is about people’s access to healthy food, clean water, decent sanitation, adequate housing/shelter, steady employment and proper health information. Because health is determined by so many factors outside the health services, we need to promote people’s understanding of the Social

Determinants of Health as part of the campaign. The campaign must be led by civil society, including many sectors required for the health of communities.

The People's Health Movement perspective is Right to Health – Health for All. The Right to Health includes rights to a range of social determinants of health (clean water, food security and nutrition, education, housing, clean and safe environment etc.), as well as, VERY CENTRALLY, the Right to Health Care.

It is time again to give an update where the campaign has gone since the beginning of the year.

Several countries have joined or are in the process of joining the campaign*: Kenya, Uganda, Morocco, Argentina, Brasil, Ecuador, Colombia, Philippines, Bangladesh, Nepal and Pakistan.

Other countries have already submitted their plans and expect to start soon*: Gabon, Senegal and Djibouti.

Some countries have an ongoing campaign*: Burkina Faso, South Africa, Mali, Guatemala and India.

The Health Rights of Women Assessment Instrument, in short HeRWAI. is a newly developed, practical tool for organizations that want to bring a human rights approach into practice. Through a HeRWAI analysis, organizations can explore the impact of a policy is in terms of women's health rights and build up arguments to improve the policy. The analysis includes local, national and international influences and is based on the norms set by Convention on the Elimintation of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women and International Convention on Economic Social and Cultural Rights. The electronic version of HeRWAI is available at:

http://www.humanrightsimpact.org/fileadmin/hria_resources/HeRWAI_Centre/HeRWAI.pdf