With increased migration around the world posing unique challenges and opportunities for health systems, efforts to better integrate and include migrants and host communities in national health systems are an integral part of the global health equity agenda. 

This brief introduces the social determinants of health (SDOH) concept and terminology, and discusses approaches to addressing SDOH. Understanding these root causes of health inequities and their impact on health care access, quality, and equity is crucial to strengthening health systems.

Civil society organizations in Timor-Leste are playing important roles to identify health system problems and solutions, contribute ideas to the Ministry of Health’s (MOH) annual action plan, and participate in monitoring that holds the government accountable.

This two-pager focuses on USAID’s Learning Question 5, “What are effective and sustainable mechanisms or processes that enable the participation of private sector, civil society, and public organizations in developing locally-led solutions to improve high-performing health care, especially for poor and vulnerable populations? What enables the effective participation or leadership of marginalized populations themselves in the development and implementation of these solutions? Under what conditions is this participation different?”

Uniéndose, las organizaciones locales y regionales están trazando un camino adelante para mejorar el acceso a la atención médica para las mujeres y otros migrantes vulnerables en Honduras.

Joining together, local and regional organizations are plotting a way forward to improve health care access for women and other vulnerable migrants in Honduras. 

Colombia ha emergido como líder en la elaboración de políticas que integran a los migrantes a la economía y la sociedad, garantizan su derecho universal a la salud y movilizan recursos nacionales para cumplir con la creciente demanda de servicios de salud.

This technical guidance document provides a summary of principal findings that highlight those complex factors including a literature review, surveys, resource mapping, case studies including key informant interviews, and the development of a theory of change.

Through an LHSS-Joint Learning Network learning exchange, health practitioners from seven countries are sharing successful experiences and promising practices to institutionalize explicit national priority-setting processes for health. The goal? To help countries set equitable national health priorities and ensure that these priorities are reflected in national health plans and budgets.

Colombia has emerged as a leader in creating policies to integrate migrants into the economy and society, guaranteeing their right to health and mobilizing domestic resources to meet the increased demand for health services.

This brief shares insights from LHSS’s review of Timor-Leste’s thriving landscape of civil society organizations (CSOs), with a focus on those that are active in the health sector.

By now, much has been written about the egregious global inequities in COVID-19 vaccine distribution. But less has been said about another inequity that holds serious implications for global health: the disparities in genomic sequencing capacities and capabilities worldwide.

It is easy to fall back on the habit of using catchall terms like “vulnerable groups” to refer to many different people, but relying on these terms can have a harmful unintended consequence.