Health policy and planning
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Despite the high prevalence of mental illness, mental health remains a low priority in Africa. There has been no investigation of the views of stakeholders in Africa on why this is and what can be done. This paper reports a comparison of the views of stakeholders in Ghana, South Africa, Uganda and Zambia, focusing on the priority given to mental health by the government at the national and regional/province levels. ⋯ Respondents put forward a range of experiences and suggestions for increasing the priority given to mental health. We conclude with broad suggestions to raise the priority of mental health. These suggestions are particularly relevant as mental health increases in priority on the international agenda, in order to inform advocacy for increased priority for mental health in Africa.
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The Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) is an exemplar result of global health diplomacy, based on its global reach (binding on all World Health Organization member nations) and its negotiation process. The FCTC negotiations are one of the first examples of various states and non-state entities coming together to create a legally binding tool to govern global health. They have demonstrated that diplomacy, once consigned to interactions among state officials, has witnessed the dilution of its state-centric origins with the inclusion of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in the diplomacy process. ⋯ Qualitative data were collected from 34 public documents and 18 in-depth interviews with participants from the Canadian government and Canadian NGOs. This analysis yielded five key activities or roles of the Canadian NGOs during the negotiation of the FCTC: monitoring, lobbying, brokering knowledge, offering technical expertise and fostering inclusion. This discussion begins to address one of the key goals of global health diplomacy, namely 'the challenges facing health diplomacy and how they have been addressed by different groups and at different levels of governance' (Kickbusch et al. 2007a: 972).