Short Abstract

This panel examines how African governments, health systems and populations navigate medical pluralism and global health policies, from vaccination to COVID-19 to today's uncertainty, exploring diachronically their local implementation, negotiation and adaptation and inequalities in access to care.

Long Abstract

Health and healthcare in Africa are shaped by the interaction of diverse medical practices, national health systems and increasingly influential global health policies. Biomedical services coexist with traditional and complementary medicine, religious healing, community-based care, pharmacies, informal providers and self-care, while governments and health institutions implement global programmes addressing vaccination, epidemics and other public health priorities. This panel examines how global health policies are translated, negotiated and adapted within these plural African health landscapes, taking into account the existing inertias. Rather than understanding initiatives such as Gavi-supported vaccination programmes or responses to COVID-19 as straightforward processes of policy implementation, it asks how governments, health professionals, communities and individuals interpret, appropriate, contest and reshape global interventions in practice. Particular attention is given to the relationship between medical pluralism, or iatrodiversity, and access to healthcare. How have people been navigating between different providers and forms of medical knowledge since colonial time? How do trust, inequalities, local knowledge and previous experiences of health interventions affect public health programmes? Conversely, how have international and global health initiatives been transforming national institutions and local therapeutic practices?

The panel welcomes pluridisciplinary contributions on any scenario referring to medical pluralism in Africa, preferably adopting both a diachronic (historical) and applied approach, that facilitates comparation. Ultimately, it asks what African experiences of implementing and negotiating health can contribute to surpass the persistence in global health of “sanitary borders”, inherent to “international health” and tropical medicine, allowing more plural, locally grounded and equitable approaches to health governance.

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