Territorial colonialism ended but global health crises such as HIV and AIDS, Ebola and Covid-19 indicate that colonisation of medicine, economics, and of politics, remains alive.
77 percent of the globally administered Covid-19 vaccinations have been given in just 10 of the 195 countries across the world.
Global health entails partnerships between institutions in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) and high-income countries (HICs), the colonised and the colonisers respectively.
The persistent influence of coloniality threatens the response to Covid-19, hence calls to decolonise global health.
The Covid-19 pandemic, the Black Lives Matter and Women in Global Health movements reveal serious asymmetries of power and privilege that permeate all aspects of global health.
Territorial colonialism ended but global health crises such as HIV and AIDS, Ebola and Covid-19 indicate that colonisation of medicine, economics, and of politics, remains alive.
An equal global health architecture without a hint of supremacy is not global health as we know it today since HICs shape the language and response to pandemics resulting in adverse health outcome.
In the Covid-19 pandemic, the colonial dynamics have particularly struck a nerve on the African continent reminding us that global health originated in the colonial-era field of ‘tropical medicine’ and transitioned to ‘international health’ with LMICs being treated as subjects of a quasi-philanthropic complex controlled by HICs.
The COVID-19 pandemic has shone light on the pre-existing inequalities in global health; 77 percent of the globally administered Covid-19 vaccinations have been given in just 10 of the 195 countries across the world.
The 2014–2016 Ebola outbreak in West Africa was the largest and most complex since the virus was first discovered but borders were drawn to isolate the virus from the global health priorities since it only affected Africans as at that time.
Inequalities are also evident in medical education, knowledge production, publications, healthcare funding, governance, accountability, and ethics through which LMICs policies must be aligned to donor priorities. To decolonise global health, all forms of supremacy within all spaces of global health practice must be removed through a radical disruption of the axis of power and the time is now.
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