“During this year’s World Health Summit (and all the previous ones I attended), and in every One Health/planetary health convening that I participated in since the beginning of my career, everyone has said, “We must engage the Global South.” But it will never happen if the general notion that knowledge and expertise only flow from North to South is not totally dismantled.”
-Renzo Guinto
In this piece for PLOS Global Health, 2016 New Voices Fellow, Renzo Guinto, shares his reflections on the proposal for the establishment of a ‘One Sustainable Health (OSH) Institute’ at the World Health Summit in Berlin. As one of the very few people in the room coming from the Global South, he notes the importance of “wisdom of the Global South”, “power of communities”, and “the energy of the youth” in serving as the foundation of the Institute.
Guinto further emphasizes that to harness these three key aspects and to enable a “multidirectional flow of knowledge and expertise” in the new OSH system, politicians, policymakers, academic leaders, and others must listen, invest and center the Global South. This will not only be essential, he notes, for fostering equitable partnerships but is also vital to the decolonization movement as a whole.
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