power Archives - Social Science in Humanitarian Action Platform

Health through People’s Empowerment: A Rights-Based Approach to Participation

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.

Transforming Policy into Justice: The Role of Health Advocates in Mozambique

Background Reports

Despite expanding policy commitments in many poor countries, health care is often a failure at the point of delivery. Lack of information, poor enforcement, and power dynamics prevent those whose rights have been violated from pursuing redress. In Mozambique, grassroots health advocates work to address this gap between policy and reality by blending approaches known as legal empowerment and social accountability. They raise awareness of health policy, support clients to seek redress for grievances, and facilitate problem-solving dialogues between communities and health facility staff. In three years we have seen communities begin to overcome a culture of silence. Twenty-one advocates and their clients have achieved redress to over a thousand grievances across 27 health facilities.
These cases have resulted in improvements to access, infrastructure, and provider performance. Advocates have supported village health committees to transform themselves from collections of names on a list into active agents for change.