Right to Health and Health Care Campaign

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

This past week, the People’s Health Movement and Oxfam International participated in two Washington, DC events focusing on how beltway institutions like the World Bank, the International Finance Corporation (IFC, the private sector arm of the World Bank), USAID, etc., promote involvement of the private sector as the key to scaling up health care. The occasion was the release of the Oxfam briefing paper Blind Optimism: Challenging the myths about private health care in poor countries and PHM’s Global Health Watch 2.

Country updates

We have significantly advanced in the campaign's expansion since our last update in May.