Newsletter Contents:

GEGA Activities

Upcoming Gauge and External Activities

Equity resources, documents, and websites

Publishing opportunities

Feedback needed

Next Month:

* Reports on Coordinator visits to Gauges in Burkina Faso, Ecuador, Chile, and Zimbabwe

* Initial draft of internal policies for GEGA, submitted for discussion

* New Upcoming Activities, Resources, and Publishing Opportunities

• Completion of Report of the Uganda meeting, (The report of the meeting by the Uganda Gauges IPH has also been distributed by that team)
• May 22 conference call meeting of the Coordinating Committee. View Minutes
• Design of a GEGA Logo
• Development and printing of a GEGA leaflet which may be translated into various languages for use by the Gauges. Send comments, suggested changes, or requests for additional copies to the Secretariat.
• Completion of a draft funding proposal, attached for your comments. The funding proposal includes an explanation of much of the Coordinating Committee's vision for the development of GEGA over the next two years. View funding proposal and budget narrative at http://www.gega.org.za/download/newsvol1/gegafundprop.doc http://www.gega.org.za/download/newsvol1/budget_sn.doc
• Early-stage GEGA webpage. Send suggestions and documents to Secretariat.
  

• Planning for a Coordinating Committee meeting in August. A preliminary agenda, submitted for your comments and suggestions.
• Development of internal policy. A preliminary version of policies will be forthcoming soon, open for comments and additional suggested topics.
• Development of a technical support strategy, with Paula Braveman. If you have recommendations for the strategy, or if you have specific support needs, please send a note describing those needs to the Secretariat.
• Initial search for appropriate technical consultants and resources. If you have recommendations, please send them to the Secretariat.
• Work on developing a Global Gauge is expected in the next several months. Ideas can be sent to the secretariat.
• The initial concepts of a Global Network for GEGA, which would allow greater interaction between Gauge and non-Gauge activities, strategies, and capacity. If you know of non-GEGA individuals who would like to keep up with GEGA's activities and would be active network members, please have them send a request to the secretariat to be on GEGA's Network listserve.

• In April, GEGA was represented at a meeting on Sub-National Health System Performance Assessment, a WHO effort to develop strategies measuring inequalities within countries. View a short report of the meeting
• In May, Lexi attended a workshop in Cameroon on Norman Daniels' Benchmarks of Fairness for Health Reform, which may be of use to several of the Gauges. Work has already been planned with the Chilean Gauge and with BRAC in Bangladesh (a Gauge institution). Lexi will be helping with the development of a manual for applying the Benchmarks, and welcomes any Gauge experiences, comments, perceptions, examples of work, etc. that would be useful for the manual.
• In June, representatives from nine Gauges, several Coordinating Committee members, and Lexi attended the International Society for Equity and Health (ISEqH) Conference in Toronto, Canada. Because many Gauges were present at the ISEqH meeting, it may be useful to consider building a GEGA activity or meeting around the next ISEqH meeting in 2004. In fact, GEGA has submitted a proposal for South Africa to host the next ISEqH meeting.
  • The meeting itself was not only an opportunity to learn about the activities and strategies of other groups around the world working on equity issues, but also revealed the potential importance of GEGA's and the Gauges role in ISEqH: specifically, there was a strong desire expressed by members for more advocacy, and organized advocacy, at multiple levels. More will be forthcoming on this issue in next month's newsletter, but ideas are welcome…
  • The program of the 2002 meeting, including presentation titles and the names of presenters, can be found at http://www.iseqh.org/en/conf02/agenda.pdf, and the ISEqH home page is http://www.iseqh.org/index.html. The program is available in English, Spanish, and French. If you were not able to attend the meeting and are interested in any of the presentation titles, send a request to the Secretariat and the abstract and presenter's contact information will be sent to you.
  • We also request that any presentations made by the Gauges be sent to the Secretariat and these will be distributed to the group in the next newsletter and placed on the GEGA website.
• IDRC and PAHO sponsored a meeting directly after the ISEqH meeting in Toronto, which presented several useful tools for health equity work, including tools for Geographic Information Systems, Health Impact Assessments, and RAHEST (which facilitates immediate visual analysis of geographic health information, and which the Chile Gauge will be investigating more in October). GEGA invites further exploration of these tools, and comments on their relevance to Gauge work. More information on their usefulness and application will be forthcoming.
• Other tools: The South East Public Health Observatory (SEPHO) has recently launched a prototype online tool to assist in understanding and measuring health inequalities and deprivation. Developed with Roy Carr-Hill and Paul Dixon, the tool is designed to be an easily navigable system for users to access information and support in the area of health inequalities. The toolkit has descriptions and directions for using various data sources and methodologies and includes links to data sources. It can be viewed at: http://www.sepho.org.uk/HealthInequalities/carrhill/index.htm.
  

• July 2: Workshop on Equity in Ougadougou, Burkina Faso. Program
• August 12-17: Seminar on Inequities in Health, Ecuador Gauge. Document in Spanish only.

• July 15-19, 2002: Training on Health Impact Assessment in Liverpool, England. (Another Training session may be scheduled for December).
• February 4th-7th, 2003: Conference on Women's Health and Rights In Africa, in Johannesburg, South Africa.
• March 2-April 13, 2003: African Course in Health Social Science, in Cape Town, South Africa, with participation by lecturers from the University of the Western Cape, South Africa; Makarere University, Uganda; and the Medical Anthropology Unit, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
  

• PAHO Equity Listserve. Provides information on publications, conferences/meetings, and other equity-related activities. As the listserve generates several messages every day, it may be useful for one person from each Gauge to subscribe. Archive of past documents from the listserve at http://listserv.paho.org/Archives/equidad.html. To subscribe to the listserve, contact Ana Lucia Ruggiero at ruglucia@paho.org
• Document. Paula Braveman and Eleuther Tarimo in Social Science and Medicine: Abstract: "Social inequalities in health within countries: not only an issue for affluent nations". The link for the full-text document is also found at that site.
• Document: Rating the Strength of Scientific Research Findings, published by The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. Also available is the summary, full report, and fact sheet.
• Website and documents: eHealth Innovation focuses on issues related to the "conceptualization, design, development, application and evaluation of new ways of using existing or emerging Information Communication Technologies in the health sector." More information at http://www.uhnres.utoronto.ca/ehealth/html/home/eh_home.shtml.
  
  

Publishing opportunities
Because publication is a very useful and inexpensive way for GEGA to support external relationships and also engage in advocacy and capacity development, we will keep track of opportunities for Gauges to publish their work, and relay that information here. Please send equity-related opportunities you know of to the Secretariat. Current opportunities include:

• Open invitation: The on-line journal "Population Health Metrics Electronic Journal," published by BioMedCentral will begin publication in late July (disclosure: Lexi is on the editorial board). The journal includes regular sections on health inequalities and on summary measures. Because the journal is in an early state of development, there may be special opportunities for publication at this time. The journal follows standard BioMedCentral guidelines for format and preparation of manuscripts as set out on the website at www.biomedcentral.com. Please contact Lexi at lexi@gega.org.za or secretariat@gega.org.za for more information.
• Open invitation: ISEqH will soon launch a journal through BioMedCentral. Discussion of possible articles by GEGA as well as the Gauges could be initiated now.

Feedback from you!
In order to make the newsletter an effective forum for communication, we need your participation. Please send your feedback to secretariat@gega.org.za by July 20th.

• Information relevant to the Newsletter, including upcoming equity activities by Gauges or other groups, publication opportunities, tools, documents and publications
• Expertise in Gauges and among outside contacts for capacity development and technical support. Send name, contact information, and area of expertise
• Comments on the agenda for the Coordinating Committee meeting in August.
• Ideas for a Global Equity Gauge (please summarize idea in one paragraph; ideas will be distributed for discussion)
• The names of individuals or organizations that might be interested in participating in GEGA's Global and/or Regional Networks
• Comments for manual on Benchmarks of Fairness
• Webpage improvements: general comments, specific recommendations, documents, pictures and links for inclusion
• Comments on the GEGA leaflet and draft funding proposal
• Ideas for coordination between GEGA and ISEqH
• Requests for abstracts from the ISEqH meeting
• Electronic versions of documents presented at the ISEqH meeting or for any other venue

See you next month..!