ABSTRACT
Chapter 5 Migration, health, and sustainable-development linkages: exploring southern contexts. Chapter 5 shows why health is a paramount driver of, or barrier to, sustainable development and how mobility affects the contributing processes. The discussion of health/development interdependencies involves enabling conditions, the impact of transnational trade and advertising on local health, community awareness, resource allocation, migration as a strategic decision, economic and social remittances, failed policy responses, distortions attributable to the internal drain of health-care professionals, task shifting, NGO roles, boundary spanning, health promotion as a vehicle for policy transformation, inter-sectoral analysis, and cross-agency collaboration. The tight connection of poverty and resource inequality to challenged health systems and poor health outcomes in the South provides the context for analysis. Basic health care and the challenges of “reaching the last mile” are addressed. The fatal flow of expertise (South-North, South-South, and rural-urban) receives detailed scrutiny. Pathways for turning vicious cycles into virtuous ones are explored. Chapter coverage includes the health of returning migrants and promising prospects for diaspora contributions to public health and sustainable development through physical and virtual circular migration. Improving health in Southern contexts requires simultaneous action on multiple fronts and across multiple sectors. In particular, efforts to address infectious and communicable disease and to overcome poverty need to be undertaken in concert.
