4-day-experience in the 36th General Conference of UNESCO…

Now that I’m back home sitting on my desk and far from the UNESCO world,I can just tell you that the last days in the “big house” were an amazing experience!

For one day and a hafl(26th and 27th),Discussions at the forum were focused on “How does UNESCO contribute to building a culture of peace and to sustainable development”. It provided an opportunity to explore bold and innovative ideas and ways of promoting peace and prosperity in a globalized world, through UNESCO’s fields of competence. Keynote addresses were made day by  Pal Schmitt, President of the Republic of Hungary,  Ali Bongo Ondimba, President of the Republic of Gabon,  Alassane Ouattara, President of the Republic of Côte d’Ivoire, Tillman Thomas, Prime Minister of Grenada,  Pascal Irenée Koupaki, Prime Minister of the Republic of Benin. Raila Odinga, Prime Minister of Kenya, Boris Tadic, President of the Republic of Serbia and other special and important participants.

On the 28th morning and just before heading to the airport,I assisted to the presentation of the Youth Forum draft by the 2 youth delegates.A special thank was made by the representative of Indonesia followed by a big applause from the member states.

During evening social events,me and Roopa were socializing with the delegates and gathering the contacts of the National Commissions.We even talked about the March Meeting2012 to the representatives of Ghana who promised to arrange a meeting with the Minister of Education on Monday.

Most of the UNESCO offices in the countries belong to the Ministry of Education and they seem open to youth participation.For instance,encouranging the youth particpation in the National Commissions was one of the most recurrent recommendations of the Youth Forum and the General Conference.

I also had the chance to meet many interesting UNESCO staff: Mme Sonia Bahri,the chief of Science Policy & Capacity Building division,Mme Monthy,training officer at the Training & Career  Development Section who enlighted me about the internship in UNESCO and others that helped me a lot in my work.And what’s better than a dinner in a chic French restaurant with my predecessor Maxime Moulin (LO to UNESCO 2009-2010)!!!

I feel really sad that I had to leave before the end of the General Conference.Every day spent in UNESCO headquarter offers new opportunities for IFMSA.

This is the end of my first and not last adventure in Paris.I can proudly say that IFMSA participation was a real success and that we met all our expectations .

This is just the beginning of a long partnership story between IFMSA and UNESCO…

UNESCO General Conference-36th Session in Paris, France

Today marked the opening session of the UNESCO General Conference 36th Session in Paris, France. Live from the UNESCO headquarter. Lamia Jouini, LO to UNESCO and Roopa Dhatt, Vice President for External Affaires share their first day of conference wandering from booth to booth, building to building and even to event.

Lamia and I began our day in a hurried rush, as we went to get our official badges to enter the world of national delegations, NGOs, and various partners. UNESCO has a different flavor that many of the other UN agencies as it embraces culture and diversity to its true meaning. From the room filled with people adoring their national costumes to our agenda filled with culture heritage events, we could feel that we were in an UNESCO assembly–an organization dedicated to education, science, and culture.

For Lamia the opening day was “From the Youth Forum to the General Conference, just older delegates, fancier attire or “costumes,” more careful wording and diplomacy, but the same excitement and enthusiasm as our IFMSA delegates.”

We spent the day among some familiar youth delegates and many new faces. The events were primarily routine events with the opening session, establishment of the credentials committee, adoption of the agenda and the chairs, very similar to our GAs.

In the evening we attended an evening reception to honor the inauguration of the permanent exhibition OPEN UNESCO. This expo on OPEN UNESCO is about : “Enhancing awareness of UNESCO’s role, its activities throughout the world, the work conducted by its staff on a daily basis and its specificities within the United Nations system are the goals of this exhibition.

Open UNESCO is staged in an original, entertaining and appealing way, based on seven “island” stands, each focusing on a theme:
1. UNESCO: an idea in action;
2. crisis preparedness and response;
3. knowledge sharing;
4. cultural diversity;
5. one planet, one ocean;
6. human rights;
7. and peace and dialogue.

Visitors are invited – within the seven areas, adorned with symbolic objects – to listen to the stories of the Organization’s staff, represented by a flamboyant character, to watch a large animated fresco or to sit behind a console and select videos, pictures, interviews, sound recordings and multimedia publications.

In addition, touch-screen planispheres enable visitors to discover world heritage, the intangible heritage, items on the Memory of the World Register, endangered languages and biosphere reserves.”

We concluded the day with a very unique experience–the Mongolia Gala.

During this event dance, song, and music from the folk and contemporary repertories of Mongolia were represented throughout the show. “The Mongolian traditional art of khöömei and traditional morin khuur music, inscribed on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, were on the programme. Khöömei is a form of throat singing from western Mongolia, in the Altai mountains. The singer imitates nature by simultaneously producing two sounds: a continual hum and a superimposed melody of harmonics. Morin khuur (fiddle with a horse’s head), a two-stringed fiddle whose design is closely linked to horse worship, occupies a prime spot in Mongolian nomadic culture. It is most often played solo, but can also accompany dances, long songs (urtiin duu), myth recitals, ceremonies and day-to-day tasks linked to horses. Even now, the morin khuur repertoire still features airs (tatlaga) specifically aimed at taming animals. The simultaneous presence of a fundamental note and harmonics has always made it difficult to transcribe into classic notation, and explains why morin khuur is passed on orally from master to apprentice through generations.”

IFMSA in Lancet: Students’ perspective on rooting out causes of health injustice

I am reposting the commentary on social determinants of health from members of the IFMSA Small Working Group on Health Inequities, which was published in the Lancet. For those who do not have subscription in the Lancet, here is the text: http://www.lancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(11)61628-0/fulltext.

This year, the International Federation of Medical Students’ Associations (IFMSA), which represents 1·2 million medical students worldwide, made health inequities and action on social determinants of health a key policy focus.¹ A global campaign, Root Out, Reach Out,² has been organised to coincide with the 2011 World Conference on Social Determinants of Health. We believe that the final report³ of the WHO Commission on Social Determinants of Health should have provided a watershed moment in the worldwide movement towards achieving global health justice. Although some governments have heeded the report’s recommendations, the voice of the Commission has largely gone unheard because of a lack of both political commitment and effective policy making capacity. Unless addressed, these challenges have the potential to undermine any outcomes of the World Conference on Social Determinants of Health.

We believe there remains a distinct lack of political currency in addressing health inequities through action on social determinants of health, both within and between countries. Until governments are held to account for their achievement in reducing health inequities, “closing the gap in a generation” will remain a pipedream. We therefore propose that civil society groups, for example, concerned with HIV/AIDS, maternal and child health, non-communicable diseases, and climate change, bring their agendas together. An approach that is based on the social determinants of health offers a rare opportunity to turn current disease-oriented silos into a global coalition for health equity.

Advocates for the social determinants of health, supported by WHO, should intensify efforts targeted at central government departments, such as ministries of finance, trade, and labour. A strong enough case has not yet been made to these central departments, which are in the position to correct the “toxic combination of poor social policies and programs, unfair economic arrangements and bad politics”³ that lead to health inequities.  Ultimately, the UN system must take leadership in this movement. Tackling the “inequitable distribution of power, money, and resources”³ within and between countries requires collective action not just from WHO, but from all UN agencies.

Governments are still largely ill-equipped to develop effective policy initiatives for action on the social determinants of health. There has been a wide range of interpretations of the idea of social determinants of health by WHO member states and non-governmental sectors. Thus, a common understanding of health equity needs to be established, as well as baseline methodologies that reflect an approach grounded in the social determinants of health; this would ensure global coherence in policy formulation, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation. WHO should devote more resources towards fulfilling its role as an effective knowledge broker between health workers, academia, and policy makers. It should create and support dynamic research consortia on the social determinants of health that not only develop the latest evidence, but effectively translate evidence so that it can be implemented by governments – for example, as policy tools, measurement indicators, learning modules, and programme designs.

In relation to research collaboration, WHO should partner with other agencies in developing new methods and indicators, in addition to existing ones such as the Human Development Index,⁴ that can fully encompass the breadth of social determinants and can be easily used by governments for monitoring progress. We also recognise the importance of education in sustaining this global movement. The Commission recommended the incorporation of concepts like equity and the social determinants of health in the training of health professionals.³ We propose that students from disciplines beyond the health sector, such as law, economics, business, politics, and environment, also receive training on the social determinants of health. Such cross-cutting education is necessary, so that all sectors can develop the capacity for action and fulfill their obligations to health.

Ultimately, health is an outcome of how society distributes multiple determinants of health, and thus a general indicator of societal injustice.⁵ The Commission affirmed such a view, announcing that “social injustice is killing people on a grand scale”.³ As future physicians we hope to build a social justice movement that will place equity at the centre of global development and realise the long-awaited vision of “health for all”.

Ramon Lorenzo Luis Guinto, Daniel Yore, Nilofer Khan Habibullah, Altagracia Mares de Leon, Taavi Tillman, Alex Elliott-Green and *Unni Gopinathan

International Federation of Medical Students’ Associations

International Federation of Medical Students’ Associations

IFMSA General Secretariat

c/o World Medical Association

B.P. 63

012 12 Ferney-Voltaire, Cedex

France

unni.gnathan@gmail.com

We are all members of the International Federation of Medical Students’ Associations.

We declare that we have no conflicts of interest.

1. International Federation of Medical Students’ Associations. Policy Statement on Health Inequity and the Social Determinants of Health. Jakarta, Indonesia: The 60th March General Assembly of the International Federation of Medical Students’ Associations. March, 2011. http://www.ifmsa.org (accessed Sept 26, 2011).
2. Root Out, Reach Out. International Federation of Medical Students’ Association’s Week of Global Action on Social Determinants of Health. http://root-out.org (accesed Sept 22, 2011).
3. Commission on Social Determinants of Health. CSDH final report: closing the gap in a generation: health equity through action on the social determinants of health. Geneva: World Health Organization, 2008.
4. United Nations Development Programme. The Human Development Index  http://hdr.undp.org/en/statistics/hdi (accessed Oct 14, 2011).
5. Daniels N, Kennedy B, Kawachi I. Why justice is good for our health: the social determinants of health inequalities. Daedalus 1999; 128: 215–51.