The Ministry of Education and Sports has drafted a National School Health Policy to guide the design and implementation of interventions to improve health in school settings in Uganda over the period 2018-2023. Basing on results from a review of the latest draft of the policy, this brief highlights areas of the draft policy that the Ministry needs to improve in order to better align the policy with the human rights based approach, enhance its potential to achieve the stated objectives, and maximize its contribution to the achievement of the UN sustainable development goals.
The National School Health Policy 2018-2023 is being developed in response to not only the poor school health indicators but also to the underperformance of interventions that have so far been implemented. Interventions implemented by government and other actors in recent years include Uganda school health and reading program (SHRP); school health project (SHEP); school health and nutrition program; adolescent reproductive health, guidance and counselling; school water and sanitation; sexuality education and life skills, the Presidential Initiative on AIDS Strategy for Communication to Youth (PIASCY). There have also been school health programs targeting children above five years for deworming and oral hygiene and girls of reproductive age for vaccination.
In spite of these and other interventions, school health indicators remain appalling. Adolescent pregnancies remain high; UDHS 2016 estimated that one in four adolescent girls aged 15-19 years was either pregnant or already had a child. In a national study of adolescent health risk behavior in Uganda by Ministry of Health, almost 22% of adolescents reported some form of sexual activity. This not only puts their health at risk, but also their education and future wellbeing. A report by the International Center for Research on Women (ICRW) has revealed that pregnancy is responsible for the drop-out of school of 13.1% of girls aged 14-18 years in West Nile.
The countries in eastern and southern Africa and the East African Community are at
various stages of enacting laws to address counterfeiting. Counterfeiting is a problem for
public health if counterfeit medicines lack the active ingredients that make them
effective, or if they are harmful. Yet laws that define counterfeiting so widely as to
include generic medicines have even greater potential public harm, as they may make
these essential medicines available as branded versions, at significantly higher cost.
This policy brief draws policy makers attention to the need to ensure that counterfeit
laws do not inadvertently include generic medicines. It discusses the key issues in these
laws and draft laws and how they are likely to affect public health and access to
essential medicines in the region.
The extent to which health rights are neglected or promoted is a major factor in the
promotion of health equity in Africa. Central to this is the incorporation of the right to health
in the national Constitution, as the supreme law of the country. Including the right to health
as a constitutional right provides a bench mark for government, private sector and society to
respect, protect, fulfil and promote it. In many countries in east and southern Africa (ESA)
there is advocacy and debate on inclusion in the constitution of the right to health. This brief
presents a review of how the constitutions of 14 countries covered by EQUINET include the
right to health. It uses as a framework the six core obligations spelt out in General Comment
14 of the International Covenant on Economic and Social Rights (ICESR).
Electricity is an essential service for personal and household use but more so for use at such public facilities as hospitals. Interrupting electricity supply through improper procedures, particularly through unannounced or unexpected load-shedding, poses a direct risk to the lives of patients who
may be in intensive care, receiving emergency treatment, or undergoing life-saving surgery.
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