Category Archives: Gender equality

The Next WHO Global Digital Health Strategy Must Address Digital Exclusion and Online Abuse

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By Tara Imalingat and Sara (Meg) Davis

From Geneva Health Files, 22 July 2025

The World Health Assembly (WHA)’s recent decision to extend the Global Strategy on Digital Health 2020-2025 until 2027, and to launch efforts to plan the next Global Strategy on Digital Health, marked an important commitment to improving health for all by accelerating the development and governance of digital health.

However, our new research report – one of the most extensive qualitative studies on this topic – finds that some of the young people who most need to be reached with digital health solutions in low- and middle-income countries (LMIC) are left behind, and face risks of misinformation, online abuse and discrimination. WHO and member states must use these findings to inform their work on governance, planning and prioritisation, or risk driving deeper health inequities and harms for those digital health most needs to reach.

Read more at Geneva Health Files…

Right On 4: Who will be left uncounted in data on COVID-19?

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How are inequality and discrimination shaping data about COVID-19, and who is being left invisible and uncounted? On the launch of her new book on data and human rights, Sara (Meg) Davis speaks to social worker and rights activist Jolovan Wham in Singapore, who describes how thousands of migrant workers are being detained in overcrowded dorms, and were missed by the official mobile contact tracing app. In Geneva, Dr. Shirin Heidari (GENDRO) and Marina Smelyanskaya (Stop TB Partnership) address the global need for feminist principles and respect for human rights to gather data on COVID-19. Davis’ new book, The Uncounted: Politics of Data in Global Health is available from Cambridge University Press.

Right On Podcast 3: About the speakers

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We meet four inspiring women in Right On Podcast 3: Is violence against women (including trans women) on the rise? — speaking to you from Kenya to Bangkok to New York City. Here’s a bit more about them and their work. The conversation was hosted by Meg Davis in Geneva. Continue reading →

Right On Podcast 3: Is violence against women (including trans women) on the rise?

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Christine Alai PIC Kaplan Margaret Prem Pramoj

Tina Alai (Kenyan human rights lawyer), Karyn Kaplan (Asia Catalyst), Margaret Mbira Omondi (Women Concerns Center, Kenya) and Prem Pramoj Na Ayutthaya (Rainbow Sky Association, Thailand) meet online to compare notes on how COVID-19 is fueling violence against women, from girls in evacuation camps in rural Kisumu, Kenya, to transgender women isolated in lockdown in urban Bangkok, Thailand. They found some surprising commonalities. Community-based activists and human rights advocates like themselves are putting marginalized communities at the center of their work, and finding ways to work together, using international human rights standards, to find a way out of this crisis.