Academics, activists, health practitioners, and others are working to minimize longstanding power imbalances in the global health arena that took root in the colonial era.
A May 21, 2019 Devex article outlined some of the ways that colonialism has influenced global health—such as the imposition of health interventions on low-income communities without their input, or the scheduling of global health conferences primarily in the U.S. and Europe.
The article noted that Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health students recently organized a conference on decolonizing global health. Sudipta Saha, a master of science candidate in the Department of Global Health and Population and one of the organizers of the conference, told Devex that the usual approaches to global health reinforce a system that disregards or downplays the perspective of the global south.
Renzo Guinto, DrPH ’19, said, “We’re at the cusp of a larger conversation that needs to happen.”
Read the Devex article: The activists trying to ‘decolonize’ global health
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Challenging the status quo in global health (Harvard Chan School feature)