South-South Cooperation: Brazilian experiences in South America and Africa

Abstract

Over recent years Brazil has played an increasingly active role internationally, the result of its model of integration and its foreign policy directives. The health sector is a valuable and strategic area for Brazilian technical cooperation to achieve various objectives, including its development goals. This article describes the main directives of Brazilian foreign policy, conceptually defining and characterizing South-South Cooperation, illustrated through an analysis of two Brazilian technical cooperation initiatives in healthcare: one in South America, the other in Africa. The study concludes that, irrespective of the interests and power asymmetries existing in South-South Cooperation, the objectives of this cooperation were achieved through the technical work

Is there a social justice variant of South–South health cooperation?: a scoping and critical literature review

“…We further argue, unlike others [95], that technical cooperation cannot be dissociated from the larger context of power asymmetries between players or conscious efforts to minimize them. Much of the literature on SSC in biotechnology, for example, remains apolitical [96].…”

Brazilian and North-American nursing in the HOPE Project (1972): approximations and gaps

“…While, on the one hand, the technical-scientific exchange approaches peoples and nations for reasons of solidarity, on the other hand, it can disguise commercial, political, economic and cultural interests, as well as be linked to the purchase and sale of materials, equipment and the qualification of resources human resources needed to carry out activities (12) .…”

South-South cooperation in health: bringing in theory, politics, history, and social justice

“…Critical concerns have been raised about the coexistence of its bilateral cooperation and corporate interests, such as in Mozambique, where Brazil's mining and construction sectors have major investments 100 . Brazil's SSC efforts have also been part of the Workers' Party's National Health Plan, involving training and promoting universal health systems 101 . In that sense Brazil serves as an ambivalent, even contradictory, development model, purveying equity-oriented values in its domestic social policies (reducing poverty, expanding educational and health care access, promoting small business; all unraveling in the context of the global financial and commodities crisis and the domestic political crisis), simultaneous to aggressive pursuit of transnational corporate interests in commodities, agriculture, and foreign investment within a global capitalist system 102 .…”