3rd April, 2008
AMREF board member and former chair Dr Miriam Were is to co-host the 35th Global Health Council international conference in Washington DC in May. The Global Health Council is the world's largest membership alliance dedicated to saving lives by improving health throughout the world.
The theme of this year’s meeting, ‘Community Health: Delivering, Serving, Engaging, Leading’, is particularly important to AMREF because it reflects the organisation’s strategy of engaging communities in health care delivery in order to strengthen health systems.
Dr Were was recently awarded the inaugural Hideyo Noguchi Africa award for her efforts to bring basic medical services and health rights to women and children in the villages of East Africa. She will co-chair the event with Dr Zafrullah Chowdhury of the People’s Health Centre and Dr Jaime Sepulveda from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
AMREF will host a discussion on ‘Building Partnerships Between Communities and their Health Systems in Resource-poor Settings’, focusing on the need to shift from mere community participation to community partnering to strengthen health systems. Despite accelerated investment in health in sub-Saharan Africa in recent years, there has not been enough community engagement to ensure reversal of health trends and statistics.
With 50 years of experience working with communities in Africa, AMREF will present a case study to illustrate that unless communities become part of the formal health system, driving their own health development, the challenges they face will not be overcome.
During break-out sessions participants will discuss community engagement in decision making; increasing accountability to communities; building community capacity to engage with health systems; and characteristics of interventions that empower communities.
The event will enable interaction between south-based development specialists and their northern counterparts on realistic integration of communities into health systems and their respective roles in enhancing that integration.
The conference is to take place from May 27-31 at the Omni Shoream Hotel in Washington DC.