New Video Series: Highlighting Individual Voices within the Collective

Global Health Council talks a lot about the collective voice. Everything we do begins with assessing and synthesizing the viewpoints of our members to ensure our messages are informed and aligned.

Sometimes, however, it’s useful to extract individual voices from the collective. These singular points of view are the seeds from which our strategic areas of focus — the four pillars — grew. Recently, we had the opportunity to sit down with several members of the GHC community to revisit these “seeds,” asking what the concepts of “global health equity” and “global health security” mean to them. Though we use these terms daily, we wanted to know: do we all ascribe them with the same meaning? In addition, we wanted to better understand how the organizations within our global health eco-system are focused on addressing these issues.

The answers we received served as both validation — that we are placing our focus on the right things — and a challenge to address these issues in ways that make the most impact. These conversations also served to highlight the nuances and complexities contained in each pillar.

Whereas one organization seeks equity by working to break down barriers and increasing accessibility to healthcare, another may focus on patient-centered care.

For some, global health security begins at the community level. Others focus on ensuring countries effectively communicate with one another so that, when diseases inevitably travel across borders, there are systems in place to address them.

We’ve compiled these conversations into a series of brief videos that we will be sharing over the coming months, beginning today with Jackline Kiarie, Regional Programme Manager for Amref Health Africa.

We found these conversations fascinating and hope you do, too. And we want to keep the discussion going. If you would like to share your point of view, whether in a video, like this one, a blog, or in another format entirely, please let us know. We want all our members to lend your singular point of view to the collective voice.