The COPASAH Global Symposium (CoPGS) on Citizenship, Governance and Accountability in Health is being organised by Community of Practitioners on Accountability and Social Action in Health (COPASAH). COPASAH is a global community of practitioners who came together in 2011 to learn and share from each other on community led practices around accountability and health governance. The COPGS 2019 aims to strengthen the solidarity within the community of practitioners, facilitate conversations between practitioners and other key actors like researchers and development agencies and overall stimulate learning which is driven from practice in the field.
​
The theme of the COPGS 2019 is leaving No One Behind: Strengthening Community Centred Health Systems for Achieving Sustainable Development Goals. The Symposium will be organised between 15th and 18th October 2019 at the India Habitat Centre, New Delhi – India. It will bring together 500 practitioners from diverse social – cultural contexts including COPASAH members from Latin America, Eastern Europe, Sub Saharan African, Eastern and Southern Asia along with researchers, programme managers, donors and policy makers in the field of public health governance.The Symposium is being organised by COPASAH in collaboration with several global and Indian partners including the People's Health Movement, Azim Premji University – Bengaluru (India), Accountability Research Centre – American University - Washington DC (USA), Institute of Development Studies – Sussex (UK), Global Health Justice and Governance Programme – Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University New York (USA).

Since its inception, COPASAH has expanded to various regions, facilitated learning on social accountability, and highlighted contextual variables affecting the success and failure of social accountability practice, and highlighted perspectives and action approaches— primarily coming from the Global South--which have made an important contribution to the global accountability field. COPASAH has in the past focused on the social accountability approaches that are “statist,” with an assumption that the state has centralised control over social and economic affairs. Therefore the “old” actors in the accountability ecosystem-elected local and national governments, the WHO, the World Bank, etc. were at the center of the social accountability discourse. ​
Read  more...

1. To facilitate peer learning by showcasing diverse social accountability approaches and practices from different parts of the world.
2. To introduce new paradigms and concepts to social accountability practitioners to help them analyze changes in the political economy of global health decision-making and the increased role of private actors in public health policy-making and its impact on the accountability ecosystem and equity.
3. To discuss and debate the intersections between bottom-up grounded knowledge on participation and accountability with opportunities like SDGs and changing landscape of global health between concerned stakeholders.
4. To generate greater conceptual clarity and new insights around the principles and practices of social accountability and community engagement and how these elements could be made integral to strategies for achieving global health goals.

 The overall content of the Symposium will cover a set of broad themes. These include:

• Community action in governance and accountability for health systems strengthening
•  Improving access to quality health services for the indigenous, excluded, vulnerable communities and those in fragile contexts
• Moving forward the agenda for Sexual and Reproductive Health Rights 
• Setting the framework and agenda for people centred accountability of private and corporate health care sectors
• Forging alliances between the community and the health care workers

Read more...

The practitioner centred COPGS 2019 on Citizenship, Governance and Accountability in Health is designed as meeting point of practice, think-tanks and policy in community centred health systems. Participating in COPGS 2019 will provide a unique opportunity for researchers, policy makers, donors, development and policy experts to interact and dialogue with the 'foot-soldiers' of community-centred accountability practice from around the world.

As a participant you will get the opportunity to witness, engage with and experience the following:

• Open sharing and learning on diverse social accountability practices and approaches through practical examples
• Debates on evolving paradigms and political economy of policy making in global health and its impact on the accountability ecosystem
• New insights around the principles and practice of social accountability to achieve global health goals, especially as articulated in SDGs. 

Early Bird Registration for CoPGS2019
​is open now

​
The early bird registration for the Symposium is open till August 31, 2019. For more details please visit: http://www.copasahglobalsymposium2019.net/registration.html
​
Read more...