People with disabilities around the world face discrimination in their daily lives, including in their abilities to access public services and infrastructure. But what are the experiences of people with disabilities during disasters and emergencies? Do emergency responses take into account their needs? In this blog, Obindra B. Chand and Pallav Pant look at the current challenges facing people with disabilities during times of crisis in Nepal.
This book has been compiled by a group of practitioners from South Africa, Ethiopia and Germany, and draws on our collective experiences in supporting local communities in adapting to increasing climatic variability and change. The authors have written this book to meet the widely expressed need amongst practitioners for a comprehensive tool that will support practical adaptation interventions. If you are engaged in supporting members of communities affected by rapid environmental or other forms of disruptive change, this book will provide you with useful insights and practical approaches and tools that can be used to enable them to adapt more effectively.
The approach taken in this book is rooted in Participatory Action Research (PAR), which recognises that the people who are affected (in this instance) by climate variability and change are not only primarily responsible for determining and implementing responses within their own enterprises and communities,
The importance of leadership in bringing about change to improve health and well-being is increasingly emphasized — especially with the shift to SDGs — and there is now a need and opportunity to act to strengthen leadership for health. In November 2014, at the Third Global Symposium on Health Systems Research, the Alliance set out to understand how leaders define and qualify leadership by asking a selected group of leaders in public health a single question: ‘What are key attributes of leaders that create effective health systems?’
In 2015, a survey was conducted across 65 countries and in-depth interviews were carried out with 22 prominent leaders, touching upon various components of leadership for health, ranging from the make-up of teams and organizational culture, to the use of evidence and the role of a guiding vision. While key individual traits are useful and even necessary in creating good leaders,
Analysis of the academic discourse on participation, empowerment, and the right to health since the 1978 Alma-Ata International Conference on Primary Health Care and the subsequent Alma-Ata Declaration shows that each phase of the evolution of these concepts added important new aspects to the discussion. This article focuses on three crucial issues that relate to these additions: the importance of social class when analyzing the essentials of community participation, the pivotal role of power highlighted in the discussion on empowerment, and the role of the state, which refers to the concepts of claim holders and duty bearers included in a rights-based approach to health.
The authors compare these literature findings with their own experiences over the past 20 years in the Philippines, Palestine, and Cuba, and they offer some lessons learned. The concept of “health through people’s empowerment” is proposed to identify and describe the core aspects of participation and empowerment from a human rights perspective and to put forward common strategies.