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BroadReach Healthcare

In Delivery on September 19, 2009 at 1:01 am

Merging the worlds of business and healthcare

Sarah Littlehale, Staff Writer

BroadReach

“He who has health, has hope. And he who has hope, has everything,” or so goes the Arab proverb. Unfortunately, far too few people in this world have such hope.  In the eyes of many, healthcare has become a luxury for the rich yet remains fragmented and uncoordinated in the world’s most impoverished regions.  The founders of BroadReach Healthcare chose to imagine the world differently.

BroadReach is an international consulting firm based in Washington, D.C. and South Africa specializing in global healthcare management.

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Colonial Roots of Global Health

In The Expert Perspective on September 19, 2009 at 1:22 am

Lessons learned for modern humanitarian health

Paul Farmer, Peter Drobac, and Zoe Agoos

A piece in the Washington Post last September observed that “For a Global Generation, Public Health Is a Hot Field.”[i] The generation in question was, of course, that of the primary readership of this journal. In the words of one American pollster, yours is the generation appositely termed the “First Global.” But even if this trend is new—and it seems to us that its scope is unprecedented—the collection of problems classed under the rubric of global health is not new, although there are many new twists (such as acquired resistance to antimicrobials, which could not have occurred prior to their invention and widespread use). The basic lineaments of the debates are not new, either, nor are efforts to affect the health of populations far from home. The issues facing those interested in global health are old ones; many of the institutions confronting these challenges are mature bureaucracies. Even the identification of ranking challenges—what historians of science have called “problem choice”—is constrained by social forces with roots in the 19th century and before.

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A Story that Doesn’t Sell

In Uncategorized on January 15, 2010 at 12:50 am

Violence Against Women in Kenya

Taylor Poor, Staff Writer

The night after Kenya’s hotly contested presidential elections of December 30, 2007, confirmed President Mwai Kibaki for his second term and threw the country into vicious ethnic turmoil, Sarah Maluu was raped by three security officers in full uniform.[1] In the violent aftermath of the elections that lasted into the spring of 2008, Florence Mukambi lost her two children and part of her face to arson,[2] Jacqueline Imakokha and her mother were gang raped by 20 rioters, and thousands of other Kenyan women suffered sadistic brutality at the hands of angry protesters.[3]

A report by the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), The UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), and the Christian Children’s Fund (CCF) from February 2008 announced the continued use of sexual and gender-based violence as a weapon of ethnic tension in the aftermath of Kenya’s December 2007 elections.[4]

This post-election devastation is perhaps the best thing that could have happened to the battered women of Nairobi—it carries stories of rape and gender-based violence to the rest of the world. The type of gender-based violence (or GBV) seen in post-election Nairobi is not a new problem for female Kenyans. It is a symptom of a much larger concern, to which nobody has been paying any attention.

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