Global Health Dialogue

My Dad is a former minister of health here in Cameroon and also was regional director for the UN World Health Organisation for the whole of Africa for 10 years.  Now nearly 82 he is still travelling to speak at conferences and doing consultancy work for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in relation to the quality of medical training in Africa.  He is shortly off to South Africa to speak at a conference and next month has another engagement in Uganda.

Father and son

Since leaving government a few years ago he has been running Global Health Dialogue to promote good practice in community health.  Until recently the work was based on production of regular newsletters in paper form but the aim now is to move into the digital age and start to spread ideas and build a community health network internationally that can share experiences.  We are in the process of working on a website to be launched shortly and this will be a vehicle for making available Dad's leading thinking in this area.
Cameroon has a number of health challenges, although it is one of the better-off and politically stable of African countries.  HIV/AIDS has taken its toll here and life expectancy at birth remains less than 46 years compared to around 80 years in the UK.  The world bank says that the only one of the Millenium Development Goals that Cameroon will achieve by 2015 is universal primary school education, which by implication means that targets for infant mortality and maternal health will not be met.  As I write this Cameroon is experiencing a significant Cholera epidemic in the north of the country which is beginning to spread south.  Local  community groups that we are in contact with don't have access to good information on what to do to prevent cholera and treat the disease if it arrives so GHD has a role to play in this sort of urgent situation, as well as in promoting change that will lead to longer term human development through improved health.  Micro insurance to buy health services is another current area that we are looking at.

One might argue that none of this sort of intervention should be necessary as it is the role of government but things aren't that simple here.  Despite years of international aid very little of it seems to trickle down to the population such that exactly 50 years after independence there has been no progress in many key areas of public health.  The idea now is to use the internet to foster communication between communities so that good practice spreads at grass roots level.