The Project

Scholarly and policy discourse on innovation has been based on the (tacit) understanding that new developments generally occur in the west, while lower-income countries in other parts of the world adopt them only after some delay. Challenging these unidirectional models, this Sinergia project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation focuses on African contributions to global health by examining knowledge, practices or applications that were designed for improving healthcare in Africa but that have become – or have the potential to become – relevant to questions of health globally. At a time of shrinking public budgets and ageing societies in the global north, much can be learned from African countries, which have done remarkably well in the past two decades with respect to population health outcomes.

Our project brings these current concerns into conversation with academic debates on knowledge circulation and innovation. Cross-continental learning is a complex phenomenon, exceeding the analytical power of a single discipline. Our project is to our knowledge the first to tackle this phenomenon with a broad inter- and transdisciplinary perspective. Our collaborative research linking public health (Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute), urban planning (Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, EPFL) and African history (University of Basel) is empirically grounded and follows a common conceptual objective. We critically investigate concepts such as ‘innovation’, historicize them and review their underlying normative assumptions.

While our research is motivated by concerns to respond to present-day challenges in health systems, it is based on the premise that intercontinental exchanges in public health share a much longer trajectory, starting before the onset of colonialism and continuing after WW2 with the emergence of international health politics. Moreover, just as we must recognize that learning is not always positive, we must not overlook the vastly asymmetrical contexts in which these exchanges have been taking place. We are convinced that it is only on the basis of critically nuanced and historically grounded investigations that the potential of southern innovations for global health policy can be unlocked.

Hence, beyond its thematic focus, our research project advances interdisciplinary research by bridging the gap between the different academic cultures of the humanities, the sciences and application-oriented research. Our project enriches ongoing debates in public health by adopting an unorthodox perspective on innovation starting from the south and incorporating historical dimensions. Our case studies also advance the field of urban planning by intertwining it with health research, revealing previously unexplored synergies, while also gaining new insights into questions of knowledge flows in global and medical history. We examine the period from late-colonialism to the present day, focusing on colonial and international cooperation in different African contexts and the thematic fields of drug development, healthcare systems as well as environmental health and holistic approaches to healthcare.

Our collaboration will be facilitated through regular workshops and conferences and includes project partners at different African institutions. We aim to make our results accessible to scholars, students, public health experts, administrators and the public through different forms of publication, conferences and teaching activities.