As you point out, inequality manifests itself in many ways. Just last week, at the AIDS conference in Canada, many people from Africa were unable to attend due to high travel costs or denied visas. How does this affect who the world takes seriously when it comes to pandemics like HIV or Covid?
I myself was unable to attend this conference due to the high cost. I have friends who were denied boarding [after] having paid over $20,000 to get visas and buy tickets so their voices could be heard. Winnie Byanyima, the executive director of UNAids, who is from Uganda, was almost denied boarding to attend a conference that is actually her main business in Canada because she is a black woman. Institutional racism is the problem.
One day we will have a conversation about why we are still in a pandemic, because institutional racism meant that when the director-general of the World Health Organization, who was an Ethiopian man named Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said that we, the world, had a problem, the presidents of countries with high incomes refused to believe him. Therefore, the rest of the world did not take it seriously. What would happen if Tedros from Ethiopia was Ted from Colorado, would they take Covid more seriously?
At the 2022 AIDS conference, we saw a situation where people from the Global South can be excluded from conversations that are about solutions to the problems they face. How do we avoid this happening again?
What I am calling for is that people stop organizing these conferences in these places. You can’t talk about us behind our backs. Most of the burden of disease is in our countries – largely because you refuse to give us access to medicine; refuse to give us access to HIV tests. There is no point in having these conversations behind closed doors with people from high-income countries who will once again decide for us what we should do in our own countries.
It is time for our leadership to say, “We are not going to hold the AIDS conference in Canada; we will have these conferences in the global south so that we can make decisions together. Only when this world acts together as one will we have justice and fairness and true health security for the entire planet.
Researchers from lower-income countries often help peers from richer countries do research on things like new drugs, for example. But they do not receive the same recognition as their counterparts in the Global North. How do we change this?
We need to shake this world up. It’s not about being upset, because then I’d be called an angry black woman. We cannot leave this world to our children. I am the mother of a baby girl that I don’t want to have to fight [same battles] that I fought as a woman. And I don’t want to go into the premises and keep my voice down just so they can let me stay in the room because they shouldn’t feel threatened.
These institutions that have power will say to people like me, “What do you think about this?” on a phone call when they have 10 researchers writing down everything I said and then helping them publish it as their own. People still do it because I don’t have the time and resources.
We’re dealing with power outages, we’re dealing with security issues, so we don’t have the time and space to rethink this world. What we need is to rethink the world of global health and the world of global development. We need to think about what justice looks like and have a conversation about the institutional racism that says your voice has more value because you’re male or because you’re Caucasian.
The questions and answers have been edited for length and clarity.
Watch the full Health Beat interview with Ayoade Alakija
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