LSE's Global Health Initiative is pleased to host this panel, focused on the recent termination of USAID funding and its implications on epidemic control on the border of Uganda and the DRC.
This panel will offer valuable insights on the impacts of the USAID shutdown, particularly as it relates to epidemic control on the border of Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Having just returned from the region, the panel holds both current and longstanding contextual knowledge and expertise on the politics of development assistance for health. They will reflect on urgent questions that are preoccupying observers of the fast-moving political events currently taking place in the USA and Central Africa. They will consider whose lives are put at risk by the USAID shutdown, who is served by alarmist discourses and what the effect of ending pandemic surveillance and US funding will be on the spread of Mpox, cholera, Marburg, Ebola and HIV/AIDS. Finally, the discussion will focus on how the termination of USAID funds in this part of the world has global implications, as it interacts with security and trade of essential resources for the technology sector.
Meet Our Speakers
Grace Akello, PhD is a Medical Anthropologist and Ethnographer. She is currently an Associate Professor in Gulu University’s Faculty of Medicine. She studies Humanitarianism, pandemic preparedness, gendered health policy, public authority and leaders’ engagements during complex emergencies and in LMICs. Her doctoral thesis: Wartime children’s suffering and quests for therapy in northern Uganda was awarded a PhD Premium by the Amsterdam School for Social Science Research, Universiteit van Amsterdam.
Myfanwy James is an Assistant Professor in International Development and Humanitarian Emergencies at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her work examines the politics of humanitarian intervention in contexts of conflict and displacement, with a regional focus on the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Tim Allen is inaugural Director of the Firoz Lalji Centre for Africa and is Professor in Development Anthropology in the Department of International Development at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His research has focused on international criminal justice, non-formal accountability mechanisms, forced migration, reintegration following displacements, war and conflict, aid programs, witchcraft and social healing, tropical diseases, HIV/AIDS and health programs. He has carried out long-term field research in several African countries, mostly in East Africa. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. He is currently the Principal Investigator for the five-year ESRC-funded Centre for Public Authority and International Development, as well as several other grants funded by the UK research councils (ESRC, AHRC, GCRF).
Melissa Parker is a Professor of Medical Anthropology in Global Health and Development at LSHTM. Her research builds on a multi-disciplinary training in Human Sciences and a DPhil (which combined methods and approaches current in social and biological anthropology) from Oxford University. Research questions typically emerge from extensive periods of ethnographic fieldwork, and engage with contemporary ideas in social, medical and political anthropology. Topics investigated include: epidemic preparedness and response; mental health and healing in war zones; social and political legacies of mass forced displacement; medical humanitarianism, and biosocial approaches to the control of neglected tropical diseases in Sudan, Uganda and Tanzania. In October 2014, she established the Ebola Response Anthropology Platform with colleagues from the Institute of Development Studies and the Universities of Sussex, Exeter and Njala, Sierra Leone.
Philipa Mladovsky (Chair) is Associate Professor in International Development at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her work examines the politics of financing and providing health care for socially excluded populations in diverse contexts, ranging from community-based health insurance in Senegal, to mental health services for asylum seekers and refugees in the UK.
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