Prioritising health and wellbeing in African and South Asian informal settlements

Published: 20 July 2020

The Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) ARISE Hub aims to facilitate governance accountability and responsiveness for equity in health and wellbeing among people living and working in informal urban settlements in Africa and South Asia

The GCRF Global Research Hub on Accountability in Urban Health (ARISE) involves IHW colleagues Dr Linsay Gray, Prof Alastair Leyland, Dr Eliud Kibuchi, Ross Forsyth and Prof Jill Pell and is led by Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine.

Photo of ARISE group

The interdisciplinary five year long programme seeks to work with community groups, governments, international agencies and NGOs in Bangladesh, India, Kenya and Sierra Leone focussing on health and wellbeing in so called informal urban settlements. 

In the wake of the global pandemic, the current qualitative component of the programme has been adapted to conduct COVID-19-focused case studies. These are being conducted by taking a community-based participatory research (CBPR) approach and will inform the formulation of metrics and conduct of surveys which are being co-led by UofG to:

  1. identify and explore accountability and governance deficits in order to inform strategic responses by organisations to address these, within and across local, municipal, national and global spaces;
  2. understand how intersecting social inequalities may shape vulnerabilities and resilience over time in order to inform efforts to work in an empowering way with the most marginalised; and
  3. identify the health and well-being challenges that emerge to inform action.

Linsay Gray
Senior Investigator Scientist 
MRC/CSO Social and Public Health Sciences Unit

See www.ariseconsortium.org for further information. 

First published: 20 July 2020

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