Employing innovative evidence-backed community processes for maternal health services by Dalit women.

Background: Health care services express social and structural inequalities, especially for Dalits and women, due to the indignity and discrimination experienced in health care facilities. Jagrutha Mahila Sanghatane (JMS), a grass-roots organization led by neo-literate Dalit women in rural Karnataka in India, adopted a human rights-based social accountability (SA) approach to address discrimination and dignity in accessing maternal health services. This approach integrated community-based evidence with multi-pronged and multi-level accountability processes with their goal of socio-political empowerment.

Examining women's health through a psychosocial lens.

During the COPASAH Global Symposium 2019, a group of therapists and mental health practitioners tried to highlight the issue of women's mental health with two specific focuses, one being the lived experiences of persons living with mental illness and the secondary burn-out and shame faced by their caretakers. The second session explored the contours of somatisation that is often seen in the human body as a result of the impact of trauma. The participants reflected on the value of lived experiences and also discussed the challenges faced in getting representation for people living with mental illness.

Centre-staging citizenship, power and communities in accountability discourses: An overview.

This paper distils the key insights from thematic and inter-thematic deliberations of the Global Symposium on Citizenship, Governance and Accountability in Health. It describes the evolution of the symposium theme on linking accountability to citizenship and governance in health while providing an overview of the symposium. The paper further synthesises the key discussions of the core-themes, then lays out analytical reflections that have emerged from the deliberations that touch upon the issues of power and politics surrounding accountability, viz civil society, democracy, power, civic space and the role of private non-state actors that affect health rights of the marginalised.