On 24 November 2023, the Alliance, along with Health Systems Global and Health Policy and Planning launched the journal supplement Health equity: Access to quality services and caring for underserved populations, resulting from its latest cohort of publication mentorship for early-career women researchers in low- and middle-income countries. Over the past two years, the programme supported 13 mentor-mentee pairs to complete a rigorous process of developing first-time authors’ manuscripts for submission and revision through peer-review publication.
This collection represents diverse perspectives on equity from the vantage point of populations often left out from accessible, affordable and acceptable service provision: pregnant women, adolescents in informal urban settlements and Indigenous groups, among others. It explores meanings of equity as it pertains to sexual and reproductive health services, mental health, community redress mechanisms and socially-just food systems. These papers make important contributions – “conceptual, empirical and practical”, according to mentor Professor Sally Theobald – to the field of health policy and systems research.
Edited by Maria Lazo-Porras and Tricia Penniecook, the collection features papers on:
- Quality of mental health service from frontline worker perspectives in Peru in the context of COVID-19
- Food security policies and justice implications for Indigenous communities in Peru during COVID-19
- Functionality of community complaint redress mechanisms in Malawi
- Access to health services for pregnant adolescents in informal urban settlements in Kenya
- Nature, drivers and equity consequences of informal payments for maternal and child health care services in Nigeria
- Awareness and use amongst women of emergency contraception in India
- Programmatic learnings from Health Systems Global and the Alliance
Overall, this cohort of newly published early-career women health policy and systems researchers demonstrates the depth of technical and personal gain that mentorship enables. During the launch event, a panel made up of a selection of the published authors discussed the mutual lessons of both mentors and mentees on how to engage interdisciplinarily, expand networks – and in some cases, continue to seek opportunities to work together. They also discussed how to build institutional mechanisms to protect time for professional development and training, how to incentivize mentoring over the long term and how to work with and across men and women.