Methods, Knowledge, and Practical Skills Regarding Global Inequality in Healthcare, as Illustrated by the COVID-19 Pandemic
In the project ““Health Care for All? Methods, Knowledge, and Capacity to Act on Global Inequality in Health Care, Using the COVID-19 Pandemic as an Example” We will examine the intertwining of colonial and racist continuities in the field of medicine. In addition, we aim to develop recommendations for action and highlight the perspectives of resistance from BIPOC and their allies, as well as their demands.
Goal: Through the educational materials developed in the project and the workshops based on them, healthcare professionals who travel to the Global South or work with refugees and BIPoCs here will be made aware of the issue of racism in medicine. They will be provided with alternative courses of action.
Offers in 2024:
Open Webinar on Racism in Global Health on September 29, 2024!
Open to anyone working in the field of global health who wants to critically examine its colonial entanglements. For more information and to register, click here.
In-House Webinars/Workshops: “
” Initiatives and organizations can contact us to request in-house webinars/workshops related to “Medicine for All?” The webinars/workshops are offered based on a solidarity-based pricing system, so that NGOs and initiatives with more limited financial resources can benefit just as much as those with greater financial means. Therefore, we have initially set a price range of €400–€800 per webinar for 5 UE/4 hours (with two glokal speakers each). As always, our prices are negotiable. We welcome inquiries via our contact form.
Past Initiatives:
Healthcare professionals, the majority of whom identify as BIPoC, developed background papers in 2023 on various topics, such as racism in healthcare in the Global South, medical voluntarism, and the white savior complex from a Pan-African perspective. These texts and others are available on our mangoes & bullets website. In addition, our long-standing, tried-and-true online tool, “connecting the dots,” has been expanded to include a timeline on medicine and is available there in German and English.
In early 2024, test workshops were held to evaluate the educational materials that had been developed. The BIPoC healthcare professionals who created the materials served as presenters at these workshops. Feedback from the workshops was incorporated into the further development of the program. The team is now available to respond to inquiries from organizations in the field.
Background and rationale for the project:
Knowledge about global and local power relations has grown enormously in and through development education over the past 15 years (Bendix 2018). Nevertheless, the COVID-19 pandemic has once again made it clear that the medical sector has not been sufficiently addressed in a way that is sensitive to discrimination regarding its entanglements with colonial continuities, nor has it been adequately integrated into the development policy context. Three years after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is clear that approximately 80% of the world’s population in the Global South still lacks access to COVID-19 vaccines. Pre-orders of vaccine doses in the Global North to contain the pandemic amounted to three times the actual population. In the Global North alone, approximately 1.3 billion doses were stockpiled unused in 2021. The WHO’s COVAX strategy has led to a global imbalance in distribution, with people in the Global North having greater access to vaccines than people in the Global South. The strategy aimed to have 70% of the world’s population immunized by the end of 2022. Currently, this goal can only be achieved in the Global North. On the African continent, approximately 20% of the population had been fully vaccinated by November 2022, while in Europe the figure stands at around 75%. In summary, it can be noted that countries in the Global North have 2.7 times as many vaccine doses available as all the countries that were supposed to be supplied through the COVAX strategy, even though these countries have three times as many inhabitants as the Global North (see data.one.org).
Based on discourses and practices at the political, economic, social, educational, and individual levels during the COVID-19 pandemic, many historical continuities of global inequality in the field of medicine can be identified. Medicine played a key role for European colonial powers in the conquest and exploitation of the African continent (Eckart 2021 ); for centuries, the pharmaceutical industry has used the Global South as a testing ground for drugs (Bonhomme 2020); and Western medical professionals present themselves as saviors in the Global South (glokal 2013, whitecharity 2011 ). Furthermore, the medical practices of healthcare professionals from the Global South are often rendered invisible in the Global North. The training of medical personnel—particularly those from the Global North who are involved in development work—is usually inadequately tailored to the treatment of BIPoC and to assignments in the Global South.
We aim to raise awareness about these and other topics through educational programs and highlight alternative courses of action. As an introduction to the topic, we recommend our timeline on the history of medicine. You can find more detailed information on the topics discussed at mangoes & bullets.
The topic of racism and medicine is still rarely addressed in Germany. For this reason, the project is designed to be exploratory and process-oriented. We aim to continue the project beyond its scheduled end date in late 2024. Please feel free to contact us if you are interested.
Through the “Health Care for All?” project, glokal e.V. is now an official associate partner of the “Empowerment for Diversity” project at Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin. 
The project is funded by Engagement Global with financial support from the BMZ, as well as from the budget of the State of Berlin—State Office for Development Cooperation.
