Examining African contributions to global health
Reflections on knowledge circulation and innovation
Bibliographic Data
This article unites different disciplinary debates on 'southern innovation', 'theory from the South', and 'decolonisation of knowledge' in order to discuss existing understandings around the role of Africa in the production of health-related knowledge, public health policy, and medical innovation. Arguing that high-income countries have much to learn from the global South when it comes to health-related knowledge and practices, we propose an interdisciplinary research approach to uncovering and examining African contributions to global health, drawing on an ongoing collaborative project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. We present four empirical case studies concerning drug development, healthcare systems, and urban planning to critically enquire into both historical and contemporary transcontinental knowledge circulation and learning potentials, as much as cases of forgetting and silencing. On this basis, we argue that 'learning from the South' must mean more than transplanting quick and cheap technological fixes to serve societies in the global North, but rather recognising the vast contributions that Africans have made to global epistemologies, without losing sight of the asymmetries inherent in South-North knowledge exchanges. Lessons learned might apply to fields other than those discussed here and go far beyond 'reverse innovation
Discipline · Economic growth · Economics · Global health · Government (linguistics · Health care · Political science · Public relations · Social science · Sociology · Biotechnology and Related Fields · Global Health and Surgery · Innovation and Socioeconomic Development
‘The planned city sweeps the poor away…’
Drug development for neglected diseases
The Global South
Use of science to guide city planning policy and practice
Estimates of the global, regional, and national morbidity, mortality, and aetiologies of diarrhoea in 195 countries
City planning and population health
“Africa Isn’t a Testing Lab”
Covid-19 across Africa
The Political and Social Thought of Kwame Nkrumah
That’s not how the learning works – the paradox of Reverse Innovation
Reverse innovation in global health systems
Mutual learning and reverse innovation–where next
Strengthening health systems by health sector reforms
Colonial Philosophies, Urban Space, and Racial Segregation in British and French Colonial Africa
Medicine, Empires, and Ethics in Colonial Africa
Using Open-Access Data to Explore Relations between Urban Landscapes and Diarrhoeal Diseases in Côte d’Ivoire
Why are pro-poor exemption policies in Tanzania better implemented in some districts than in others
The colony as laboratory
Confronting the Challenges in Reconnecting Urban Planning and Public Health
Choosing a future for epidemiology
On planting and planning. The making of British colonial cities
Participatory Budgeting in Europe
Theory from the South
The right to the city
Building Institutional Capacity through Collaborative Approaches to Urban Planning
Excremental Colonialism
| Unique citing works | 2 |
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| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2024 - 2024 (1) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 2 |