The Binds of Global Health Partnership: Working out Working Together in Sierra Leone

Abstract

Global health partnerships (GHPs) are the conceptual cousin of partnerships in the development sphere. Since their emergence in the 1990s, the GHP mode of working and funding has mainly been applied to single-disease, vertical interventions. However, GHPs are increasingly being used to enact Health Systems Strengthening and to address the global health worker shortage. In contrast to other critical explorations of GHPs, we explore in this article how the fact, act, and aspiration of binding different actors together around the ideology and modes of partnership working produces the perpetual state of being in a bind. This is an original analytical framework drawing on research in Sierra Leone and London. We offer new insights into the ways in which GHPs function and are experienced, showing that along with the successes of partnership work, such arrangements are often and unavoidably tense, uncomfortable, and a source of frustration and angst.

Geographic charisma and the potential energy of Ebola

“…West African development trajectories were reversed and health infrastructure was further eroded by the closure of medical schools and the disproportionate mortality of those West African healthcare workers brave enough to staff treatment units. Looking forward, the challenge will be to cultivate and harness new forms of geographic charisma sufficient to ensure resource allocation to the long term, slow burn of Health Systems Strengthening and Human Resources for Health in a global health funding landscape predicated on quick-fixes and immediate results (Herrick and Brooks 2018).…”

‘Like a real hospital’: imagining hospital futures through homegrown public–private partnerships in Tanzania

“…However, few studies empirically explore how specific actors on the ground shape or engage with partnerships (Gerrets 2015; Kamugumya and Olivier 2016; but see Brown 2015; Citrin et al . 2018; Herrick and Brooks 2018). In addition to drawing crucial attention to problematic inequalities shrouded in the term ‘partnership’, an ethnographic focus on the aspirations and practices of differently situated actors undertaken through ‘partnership’ unearths which capabilities might be imagined or opened up through this modality, and for whom.…”

Bringing relational comparison into development studies: Global health volunteers’ experiences of Sierra Leone

“…Modernization informed colonial style 'international health' and 'tropical medicine' practices, that were later re-branded as 'global health' programmes (Crane, 2010). Foremost were responses to infectious diseases such as Malaria, HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis and the 2013-16 the West African Ebola outbreak (Herrick and Brooks, 2018;Richards, 2016). Global health has overwhelmingy focussed on vertical (single) disease programmes to respond to these infectious disease threats and there is no doubt that such interventions have improved mortality and morbidity rates (Deaton, 2014).…”

“…Secondly, in 2017 and 2018 we undertook field research in Freetown; 30 interviews, 26 with Sierra Leoneans (doctors, medical students, nurses, support staff) and four with volunteers and international staff, and six ward visits. As we have explored elsewhere, engaging Sierra Leoneans in research was challenging (Herrick and Brooks, 2018). Local nurses and doctors tended to work second jobs to supplement their incomes and had little free time for interviews.…”