CONFERENCE OVERVIEW:
The failure of hospital medicine to heal and care for the majority of the African
population was established as early as the late 1970s [1]. Faced with this state of affairs, the
World Health Organization (WHO) promoted the Primary Health Care (PHC) initiative.
However, most of the countries were facing economic crisis and thus were unable to implement
PHC [2]. The economic crisis was followed by structural adjustment policies by the
International Monetary Fund - the negative impact of these policies on healthcare systems has
been established - and then states had to cope with the HIV/AIDS pandemic [3, 4]. Health
systems are now facing urgent needs in terms of mental health - the after-effects of the Covid
19 pandemic [5] - the growing burden of non-communicable diseases[6]1, ageing and eldercare
[7], when issues related to reproductive health and rights that have been on top of the agenda
for the last decades are still unresolved [8, 9].
Current understanding, interventions and approaches to deal with these issues such as
physical (infrastructure/equipment, etc.) and financial (free access to health care, social
security, private insurance, etc.) dimensions of access to healthcare, the architecture of health
facilities (as an instrument of care), patient-centred medicine, and increasingly, the need to
integrate health policies into urban planning, etc., are in general impulse from the North.
International pressure often leads governments to adjust their policies to the donor's priorities,
most of them from the North [10]. Yet as care is grounded in specific social, political, cultural
and economic networks [11, 12], spaces and places of care social worlds situated in a broader
landscape of biomedical and non-biomedical practices and discourses constantly created and
reconfigured by local actors [13, 14]. Thus, hospitals carry histories and logics of biomedical
knowledge, colonialism, gender, and the state [12, 15]. They are a creation and production of local society that we have to contextualize and address to understand practices and processes [16, 17]. If this seems to be admitted, hospitals and care practices in Africa are still analysed from Euro-American standards. Within the background and idea, there is something that needs to be fixed. It is time to change perspective.
This symposium aims to mobilise various fields like geography, sociology, history, economics, architecture, anthropology, literature, folklore, computer science, etc. to approach hospitals, care, biomedicine and the city which is emerging as an increasingly important determinant of health from historical, socio-political, economic, technological and cultural contexts specific to Africa. In so doing, we want to consider global issues such as (bio)security, big data, AI and environmental sustainability, that can no longer be ignored when addressing the issues of care and biomedical practices. We also want to consider South-South collaborations, notably the growing involvement of China, India, Turkey, etc. in policies, training and the building of healthcare facilities on the continent.
1 https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/noncommunicable-diseases
2https://www.who.int/news/item/08-10-2021-who-and-un-habitat-agree-to-ren...