News and Blog

“Social Networks of Care” – 3 panels at the European Association of African Studies Conference (ECAS), Cologne, June 2023

Writing workshop, January 8-12th, Oslo, on “Social Networks of Care in Kenya”, with Edwin Ameso, Lena Kroecker, Jacinta Victoria Muinde, and Ruth Prince.

In September 2023, we held a major oral history symposium The Public Good, Planning & Internationalism in African Health, in South Africa at Intundla Lodge

Ruth Prince will be one of the speakers at the event.

Tom Neumark, postdoctoral fellow at SUM and HELSAM on the “Universal Health Coverage and the Public Good in Africa” project, has received funding from the Norwegian Research Council funding for his project titled, “Bits, bytes and bodies: Local innovation and digital healthcare in Tanzania, University of Oslo“ (Norwegian Research Council, Researcher Project for Scientific Renewal, 2023-2027).

Our special issue on “Health for all? Pasts, presents and futures of universal health care” is soon to be published in Social Science and Medicine.

Our special issue on “Curious Utopias: Dreaming Big Again in the 21st Century?” was published by Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale in June 2022. See project publications for more details.

Postdoctoral fellow Jamie Wintrup, has been offered a permanent position as Senior Researcher at the Christian Michelsens Institute in Bergen, where he will continue his anthropological research. Congratulations, Jamie!

Jacinta Victoria S Muinde presented her paper on National health insurance, solidarities and commoning healthcare in Kenya, at the Commons Workshop hosted by the  Department of Social Anthropology (UiO) on the 14th and 15th of March.

'Health for All? Critical perspectives on Universal Health Coverage' is a special issue of the online health humanities publication Somatosphere. The issue was edited by project leader Ruth J. Prince, and contributed to by all members of the project team, with additional contributors.

Associate professor Ruth Prince at Helsam and Professor Paul Wenzel Geissler at the Department of Social Anthropology write about the early days of Covid-19 in East Africa.

We are thrilled to announce Jacinta Victoria S. Muinde, Postdoctoral Research Fellow from the Institute of Health and Society at UiO has been awarded the ASAUK (African Studies Association of the UK) Audrey Richards Prize 2020 for the best PhD dissertation in African Studies. 

In April this year our project collated and published a special issue in Somatosphere, on Universal Health Coverage and the contemporary renewal of rhetorical or concrete aspirations towards 'Health for All' entailed by UHC. The issue comprises 13 separate articles, with authors and collaborators from a range of institutions. Links to the articles are below - our thanks to the editorial team at Somatosphere, and to the many authors from beyond the project who contributed to the issue.  

In February, team member David Bannister took part in a discussion on  BBC World Service radio with Rudo Kwaramba-Kayombo, Executive Director of the One Campaign in Africa, and hosted by Audrey Brown.

Kenya has recently made high-profile political commitments to achieving universal health coverage (UHC) nation-wide by 2022. This move offers our research team a chance to follow developments, engagements and debates about UHC in Kenya, as they unfold.

At the beginning of March 2019, I attended the Africa Health Agenda International Conference (AHAIC) in Rwanda, alongside other members of the project group, Victoria Muinde and Edwin Ameso. In this blog post, I describe some of my observations from the AHAIC and relate them to research I’m currently conducting on Universal Health Coverage (UHC) in Zambia.

This is an overview of events 2018-2019 organized or co-organized by the project (workshops, conference panels, project seminars), and an overview of project-relevant presentations, papers and seminars given by members of the project team.

A reflection on the start of our project and on the disparate communities of Global Health, at the time of the Global Conference on Primary Health Care in Astana, 2018.