Sick of It: The Global Fight for Women's Health

"One of the judges described this as ‘a passionate polemic.’ The author is a professor of international politics at Queen Mary in London, with 20 years of experience working on global health politics. This is a book that has come out of a lot of thought and active engagement. The first part looks at the way in which women’s health has been weaponized for all sorts of purposes that have nothing to do with women’s health per se. Women’s health, she shows, has often been a ping pong ball that’s batted back and forth between international aid agencies and countries that are pursuing other agendas. She argues, for example, that the government of Rwanda has used a focus on maternal health to distract attention away from other less savoury things that they’ve got up to. It’s a hard read—not in terms of the language, as it’s very clearly written—but because it challenges readers to re-evaluate policies that on the surface seem entirely beneficial. The second half of the book looks particularly at the women who deliver global health programmes, such as the community health workers, who are generally unpaid, but are delivering a lot of the international aid all around the world. They’re at the sharp end of the fight for women’s global health, and are themselves affected by some of the dysfunctionalities in global health care policies—both as patients and as health practitioners. Harman doesn’t say all international aid is a calamity and should be stopped. She’s not saying that at all. What she’s looking at is the way it flows down through particular channels that might help some women but not others. For instance, she considers the emphasis on maternal health in many international aid programmes. Maternal health is really important, to be sure, but that may not be the best focus. Perhaps other things actually cause more women to die, but maternal health clinics may not be able to address any of them. So you get very focused attention on certain areas. If you were designing them from the ground up with the aim of improving women’s health, these might not be the policies you’d be coming up with."