1.Y.1. Navigating choppy water for global health competencies, education and innovation in Europe
Authors:   Organised by: School of Public Health Bielefeld University (Germany), Circle U. European University Alliance,   Chair persons: Lara Tavoschi (Italy), Victoria Saint (Germany)
Published: October 2024

Global health is rapidly evolving against a backdrop of increasingly complicated, intersecting challenges and crises across health, socio-economic and ecological systems. Interconnected social justice movements call for greater acknowledgement, accountability and qualified responses to address inequities and their structural drivers. The field of global health is going through a period of reckoning and debate about how colonial legacies and structural inequities pervade the sector and how activities of global health professionals across research, policy and practice are complicit in and perpetuating them. Simultaneously, global health education (GHE) is growing, with new speciality degrees and core or elective courses integrated into degrees in medicine, health and other disciplines. Thus, GHE holds great potential as a space to train future professionals with competencies and aptitudes to confront inequalities through innovative, evidence-informed and sensitive approaches. Yet it is also a space in which inequalities may be reproduced through material and epistemic injustices. To address these paradoxical tensions, transformation in GHE is needed in terms of what is taught, how it is taught and who is involved in teaching. This Pecha Kucha workshop will contribute to this discourse by exploring perspectives on issues including: i) What key competencies and content should be included in GHE across different disciplines and Bachelor, Master or Doctoral level?; ii) How can we better practice and develop in educators and students critical perspectives and capacities to be equipped for and responsive to inequities and social injustice?; and iii) How can we ensure meaningful engagement and partnership in education with countries across varied contexts and communities with direct lived experience of marginalisation and deprivation? Four panellists with diverse backgrounds and perspectives will provide insights on their initiatives to tackles such issues within their own institutions and European alliances, followed by a short discussion with the audience. The presentations will emphasise the need to progressively build affective, practical and cognitive competencies to critically engage with historical, geopolitical and structural inequities and injustices, including how they manifest in local contexts. Panellists will highlight examples of innovative methods and approaches to build these capacities, including through co-design in education that fosters self-reflexivity in students and builds alliances and partnerships with non-academic stakeholders, such as civil society and people with lived experience. The Pecha Kucha workshop aims to inspire exchange across institutions and countries, and with the audience, about how we can collaboratively set our compasses and our sails to navigate the choppy waters of tackling pervasive colonial legacies and sailing towards an equitable, inclusive and effective future for education and action in global health.

Key messages

• Transformation is urgently needed to ensure that global health education builds curricula and competencies that are sensitive and responsive to historical injustice and structural inequities.

• Equitable partnerships across institutions and with diverse stakeholders, and innovative educational approaches such as gamification and co-design, can address tensions in global health education.

Speakers/Panelists

Henrique Barros

ASPHER, Porto, Portugal

Victoria Saint

Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany

Francisco Mboufana

Department of Community Health, School of Medicine, Eduardo Mondlane University, Executive Secretary, Maputo, Mozambique

Mariam Sbaiti

Faculty of Medicine, School of Public Health, Imperial College London, London, UK