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.
In Ghana, Kenya and Vietnam, we found many young adults used web platforms (such as Google), social media platforms (such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter and YouTube), and social chat (such as WhatsApp, Zalo) to get health information, advice and peer support on sexual and reproductive health, HIV and Covid-19. The platforms brought clear benefits to young people, but also risks of censorship, abuse, stalking and other harms. These issues were largely not addressed by national laws and policies, and by global digital health policies such as the World Health Organization (WHO)’s Global Strategy on Digital Health 2020-2025.
The research was conducted using mixed qualitative methods and a transnational participatory action research approach in which communities of people living with HIV, as well as national civil society groups and human rights lawyers in Ghana, Kenya and Vietnam, participated in design of the study, data-gathering, analysis, and validation of the final results and recommendations. Our policy recommendations are outlined in a policy brief in English and Spanish.
We raised these concerns in an open letter to the director-general of WHO, Dr. Tedros, calling on WHO and other global health agencies to take action to protect young people from risks of harm when they seek health information online.
The study in Ghana, Kenya and Vietnam concludes the first phase of a multi-country study. The study continues in Bangladesh and Colombia, conducted in collaboration with social scientists at BRAC University and Universidad de los Andes, as well as civil society groups in both countries. The two universities also published their working paper based on desk review of laws and policies governing digital health in both countries, Digital Health and Rights in Bangladesh and Colombia.
We discussed the findings with researchers, social media influencers, health NGOs and an expert on sexual and reproductive health from WHO in a webinar, and the slides are below:
The politics that shape data creation and utilisation hold the power to construct visibility in global health. This visibility through data – or lack thereof – not only influences what programmes and populations receive support, but ultimately plays a role in shaping who lives and who dies. This is the message at the heart of The Uncounted, which interrogates how quantitative evidence is developed and implemented in global health. Following from an initial article written under the same title three years ago, Sara Davis examines the global fight against HIV/AIDS to both acknowledge the necessity of data in global health and thoughtfully critique how data are gathered, transformed, and operationalised. The resulting book – intended for both scholars and practitioners – finds new meaning against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has underlined the limitations of data utilization in public health policy.
Click here to order your hardcover, paperback or e-book copy of The Uncounted: Politics of data in global health, for 20% off using code DAVIS20 at checkout.
Scholars have recently critiqued human rights as a purely Eurocentric construct that has failed to find wider appeal and is now on the decline. Some cite the apparent success of China’s repressive political regime in support of this argument, but depicting China as uniformly authoritarian risks missing the persistence of domestic forms of human rights advocacy and mobilization.
This chapter, “The Persistence of Chinese Rights Defenders”, which I wrote a couple of years ago for the Oxford Handbook of Law and Anthropology, draws on my experience as a rights advocate to review the history of civil society mobilization in China since 2000, including actions taken in domestic courts, in non-governmental organizations, and through social media. Despite repeated crackdowns, the arrest and disappearance of leading human rights defenders, and Chinese authorities’ interference with UN human rights mechanisms, some Chinese human rights defenders do find innovative ways to persist in rights-based advocacy, such as the practice of weiguan (public counterveillance during political trials).
I argue that the world has entered a more intense phase of struggle over the meaning and application of human rights norms in diverse local contexts, and that the human rights framework facilitates transnational solidarity.
This fifth episode of the Right On Podcast, recorded for the American Anthropological Association annual conference, brings together co-hosts Meg Davis and Ryan Whitacre with medical anthropologist Prof. Cal Biruk and UN Development Programme policy officer Kenechukwu Esom to explore how human rights and quantification collide in the global HIV response.
For this episode, I reached out to two good friends who are wonderful data nerds and activists, Shirin Heidari and Marina Smelyanskaya, to talk about gender, inequality and data. When I invited Malu Marin, a longtime activist for the rights of migrant workers in Asia, she urged me to talk to her friend Jolovan Wham instead – “a very committed activist working directly with migrant workers”. Jolovan has come under more than his fair share of pressure for his advocacy for free speech – so especially grateful to him for his time, and to all three of this episode’s experts. Continue reading →
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 Healthis available from Cambridge University Press.
The Uncounted: Politics of Data in Global Health publishes today with Cambridge University Press. It’s been a long journey to get here, and you can read the first chapter here. For a 20% discount, type in DAVIS2020 at checkout. A more affordable paperback will be out later this year.
I can’t quite believe this is finally happening, but…my new book, 
Sara (Meg) Davis 