Inspiration and Illumination: People’s Health Assemblies towards a more caring world

The upcoming 5th People’s Health Assembly in Cali, Colombia, will be an opportunity to strengthen convergences that can jeopardize the existing world economic order

May 19, 2023 by David Legge
PHM activists following the 4th People’s Health Assembly in Savar, Bangladesh. Photo: People’s Health Movement

A carnival of many colors, many backgrounds, many different political perspectives; sharing experiences, discussing how people’s health is shaped, exploring how health care can be transformed: this is the People’s Health Assembly (PHA).

The PHA is the top direction-setting forum for the People’s Health Movement (PHM). But it is much more than that. Plenary presentations; sub-plenaries for further exploration and discussion; workshops, music, dancing, marching, and breaking bread.

Many participants at previous PHAs have found the experience deeply inspiring: finding comrades you didn’t know existed; learning what is different and finding what is common; hearing stories which are new but which are also familiar; throwing new light on pathways forward.

Uniting health struggles for over two decades

The first People’s Health Assembly was held in Savar in Bangladesh in December 2000. Calling it an ‘assembly’ was a direct reference to the promise by the World Health Assembly in 1979 of ‘Health for All by the Year 2000’. A central feature of the assembly were the energized discussions which led to the adoption of the People’s Charter for Health. There was also a robust denunciation of the World Bank’s involvements in health.

The second PHA was held in Cuenca in Ecuador in July 2005. A defining feature of this assembly was the prominent participation of indigenous peoples from Central and South America and beyond. The assembly affirmed the spiritual dimensions of health and health care and the need for these to be integrated into the work of PHM. This is reflected in the Cuenca Declaration.

The third PHA was held in Cape Town in July 2012. Again, there was dancing and singing and eating together, but there were also powerful insights shared and a ringing Call to Action was adopted.

In 2018, the fourth Assembly returned to Savar in Bangladesh. A key feature of this gathering was a focus on PHM’s six thematic circles (health systems, environment, gender, food, migration and peace, and trade) and the adoption of work plans in each of these domains (see Declaration).

Calling for a New International Economic Order

The 50th anniversary (in 2024) of the 1974 Call for a New International Economic Order will focus the attention of PHA5 on the importance, for people’s health, of the struggle for a fairer, more caring, and sustainable global order. The first NIEO was adopted by the UN under pressure from the Group of 77 and China. The Call for a NIEO identified the institutions, norms and agreements which sustained and protected the prevailing international economic order, and which were barriers to the economic and social development of the countries of the Global South.

The need for a NIEO was recognized in the 1978 Alma-Ata Declaration on Primary Health Care which, in Clause 3, affirmed that “Economic and social development, based on a New International Economic Order, is of basic importance to the fullest attainment of health for all and to the reduction of the gap between the health status of the developing and developed countries”.

The imperial North responded fiercely to the Call, including structural adjustment, the liberalization of trade and finance (but not the movement of people or the sharing of knowledge), extreme intellectual property protection, new powers for transnational corporations to bully governments, and the drive to privatize and marketize services, utilities and infrastructure.

A key outcome of PHA5 will be a clearer picture of how the harms to people’s health and the barriers to decent healthcare arise from the structures and systems of the prevailing international economic and political order.

The five main plenaries for PHA5 will address health systems, gender justice, ecosystem health, forced migration and war; and ancestral and popular knowledge. The sub-plenaries which follow will provide opportunities to explore how the barriers to health in each of these five areas are rooted in the prevailing international economic order. In addition, there will be workshops which will open space for further exploration of the need for a New International Economic Order and the next steps to realise this goal.

This is not just a health issue. The need for a NIEO confronts activists in all sectors of social practice. The time is now for a broadly-based campaign linking progressive social and political movements, and progressive governments; spanning sectors such as health, environment, peace, science, and culture; and looking again at the fundamental structures which are driving global warming, biodiversity loss, war mongering, and widening economic inequality.

PHA5 can provide further drive to this convergence.

People’s Health Dispatch is a fortnightly bulletin published by the People’s Health Movement and Peoples Dispatch. For more articles and to subscribe to People’s Health Dispatch, click here.

David Legge is a physician and activist in the People’s Health Movement. He has been active in PHM since the first People’s Health Assembly in Savar in 2000, including participating in International People’s Health University courses, the WHO Watch and the WHO Tracker.