Global Wishes for 2024
Global wishes for 2024: Pay for family leave. Empower Black men. Respect rural voices
New Year's resolutions, it turns out, probably originate in the Global South. The Babylonians of 4,000 years ago threw a heck of a party on (their) New Year and would make promises to the gods to do various righteous actions.
Here at Goats and Soda, our New Year's tradition doesn't go back quite as far(dating to ca. 2022, some scholars say ...), but we are proud of it nonetheless: We ask global health and development leaders around the world to offer up a wish for the coming year. Through their responses, we can see the hope, determination and, sometimes, the frustration of these activists, scientists and thinkers.
Here are their global wishes for 2024.
SCCHWA's favorite is the following:
My wish: Meaningful investment in community health workers
Sheila Davis, CEO of Partners In Health
Community Health Workers (CHWs) are frontline public health workers with deep understanding of the communities they serve. Decades of research has documented the effectiveness of CHWs in addressing community health needs—especially in rural, impoverished, and other medically underserved areas—resulting in stronger health systems, substantial cost savings, and, most importantly, improved health outcomes.
Globally, health systems are starting CHW programs and the need for CHWs is increasingly recognized, but there are great disparities in access to care and a lack of long-term funding solutions from insurance and government-funded programs. In 2024, my wish is that CHW care becomes accessible to the people who need it most through comprehensive financial support, including Medicaid and insurance coverage in the U.S., and more equitable health systems globally.
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