Written by By Dr. Julian Natukunda, Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Oxford.
In a time when the world feels divided and uncertain, solidarity might just be our most radical and necessary act. Young people are clearly among the new powerhouses that must be brought into consideration to enact lasting change in global health.
San José, Costa Rica – The Mesoamerican Workshop on Solidarity and Global Health, held on 26–27 February at San José’s Museo Calderón Guardia, brought together activists, scholars, and policymakers from across Latin America to challenge conventional notions of solidarity in global health. The event, organised as part of the Global Health Solidarity Project, facilitated groundbreaking discussions on how solidarity must be reimagined in the face of colonial legacies, capitalist structures, and systemic inequities shaping health outcomes.
From 23 - 25 February 2025, the Global Health Solidarity Project , the Southern African Rural Women's Assembly (RWA) and UCT EthicsLab co-hosted an immersive summer school titled, "Solidarity: Embodied and Enacted".
On the 14th of November 2024, the EthicsLab attended the photo-documentary exhibition Guardians of Seed, Land, and Life: The Seed Research Journey of the Southern African Rural Women’s Assembly that was showing in the Cape Town Castle. The exhibition showcases the ‘herstories’ of rural women seed guardians in seven SADC countries: eSwatini, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe. The exhibition celebrates the quiet and silent yet powerful activism of the RWA seed guardians and the seeds they hold.
On 10th July 2024, the Moving Beyond Solidarity Rhetoric in Global Health project team organised a workshop where global health practitioners discussed findings from the project’s consultative meetings conducted in Ghana and Guinea on the practice of solidarity in global health.
The workshop was part of the annual Oxford Global Health and Bioethics International Conference, which fosters multi-disciplinary debates and addresses ethical concerns in global health conception and implementation.
The Second Regional Workshop of the Global Health Solidarity Project which targeted participants from Francophone Africa took place on 18th and 19th March 2024, in Conakry, Guinea. The workshop was organized by co-investigator Prof. Elysée Nouvet, in collaboration with Guinea's National Health Research Ethics Committee (CNERS), under the leadership of Prof. and Doctor Oumou Younoussa Bah-Sow.