Bury the chains

brett — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 21:25:07 +0200

I'm reading a fascinating book at the moment, called Bury the Chains, by Adam Hochschild. It's the history of the British campaign to abolish slavery.

It often astounds me that the history of slavery gets so little attention. I mean, this was human rights abuse, a crime against humanity on a massive scale. I'm talking millions of deaths and millions of people uprooted and transported across the Atlantic to live lives of misery.

For anyone who wants to educate themselves about the slave trade, I recommend Hochschild's book. It's really well written and is a gripping story. But while Hockschild provides a lot of interesting (and horrific) details about slavery and the Atlantic slave trade, this is not the real the focus of the book. The real focus is the campaign in Britain, to abolish slavery.

This makes the book doubly interesting, as it's not only an historical account, but has important lessons for the present. The campaign to abolish slavery was really the first major human-rights-based advocacy campaign -- a campaign to mobilise people to change government policy. More remarkable -- a movement by British citizens to change government policy not for themselves, but for the benefit of a group of people far removed from their country (of course, bearing in mind, that these British citizens had benefitted from the misery of this group of people for decades).

The campaign to abolish slavery was remarkable also because at the time it started, most people in Britain and Europe as a whole, thought slavery was a perfectly acceptable and even normal state of affairs. In fact, even the Anglican Church owned sugar estates in the Caribbean, in which slaves were brutally treated.

In Bury the Chains, Hochschild shows how the campaigners went about mobilising public opinion using all the tactics we now associate with human rights campaigns: petitions, leaflets, boycotts and the like. Many of these tactics were used for the first time ever. It's a great lesson in activism and in advocacy.

One of the most important weapons the anti-slavery campaign had, was a diagram of a slaving ship, showing how the slaves were packed in. By now that diagram is famous, but at the time, it was something radically new. A stark reminder of the power of images, and well thought-out graphic communication.

Campaign launched to end medicine stock-outs

brett — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 00:28:05 +0200

On Thursday last week, NGOs and civil society organisations from across East and Southern Africa met in Nairobi Kenay, to launch a campaign to demand access to essential medicines, and an end to the ongoing stock-outs of essential medicines in government health facilities.

The regional campaign is being led by the Nairobi-based organisation Heaith Action International Africa (HAI-Africa), and Oxfam. Country campaigns will take place in Zimbabwe, Zambia, Uganda, Malawi, Madagascar and Kenya.

The campaign is funded by the Open Society Institute.

The Campaign Statement reads as follows:

'Access to essential medicines is a human right and a cornerstone of an effective primary health care system. Access to free essential medicines determines whether people live or die, suffer pain and discomfort or have their ailments cured, recover from illness or endure life-long disease.

The World Health Organization (WHO) defines essential medicines as “those that satisfy the priority health care needs of the population... Essential medicines are intended to be available within the context of functioning health systems at all times, in adequate amounts, in the appropriate dosage forms, with assured quality, and at a price the individual and the community can afford.” At the World Health Assembly in 1977, our governments made a commitment to ensure these essential medicines are available in public health facilities.”

Yet today, over 30 years later, public health facilities in Africa have in stock only about half of a core set of essential medicines. These are medicines used to treat common diseases such as malaria, pneumonia, diarrhoea, HIV, TB, diabetes and hypertension – all of which are among the highest causes of death in Africa.

Stock-outs disproportionately affect the poor, and this is exacerbated in rural areas where stock-outs are the worst. To compound these problems, stock-outs force people in already dire circumstances to buy medicines at much higher prices from the private sector. Due to these excessively high prices, patients are frequently forced to go without medicines needed to treat serious conditions that are otherwise treatable or preventable. Too often, stock-outs unnecessarily leave patients facing serious illness or death.

The “Stop the Stock-outs” campaign is calling on governments and health departments to end stock-outs now by:

* Providing financial and operational autonomy to the national medicines procurement and
supply agency.
* Giving representation of civil society on the board of the national medicines procurement
and supply agency.
* Ending corruption in the medicine supply chain to stop theft and diversion of essential
medicines.
* Providing a dedicated budget line for essential medicines.
* Living up to commitments to spend 15% of national budgets on health care.
* Providing free essential medicines at all public health institutions.

The failure to properly stock public health clinics and pharmacies with essential medicines stems in part from economic constraints and bureaucratic obstacles. But above all, it is a failure of political will. If governments commit to having medicines on pharmacy shelves, they can do it.

We call on African governments to honour this commitment to provide essential medicines. We also call upon international allies and civil society actors to assist them. It is time to “Stop the Stock-outs, Ensure Access to Essential Medicines for All!"'

For more information, please email: info@stopstockouts.org
A campaign website will soon be available at: www.stopstockouts.org