This award provides support for a three day conference titled "Health in Africa and the Post-2015 Millennium Development Agenda" to be held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on May 20-22, 2015. The symposium will facilitate an interdisciplinary examination of the health conditions in Africa 15 years after the implementation of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) that were adopted in 2000 by the United Nations. The MDGs are a set of eight international development goals with a vision to create a world with less poverty, hunger and disease, greater survival prospects for mothers and their infants, better educated children, equal opportunities for women, and a healthier environment; a world in which developed and developing countries work in partnership for the betterment of all. The objective of this symposium is to assess the success and failures of the Millennium Development Goals in the areas of health and disease in sub-Saharan Africa. A core group of researchers based at the University of Illinois in the fields of medical geography, public/global health, and epidemiology will lead the symposium. An interdisciplinary group of both young and well established researchers from Africa and North America, including graduate and undergraduate students from underrepresented groups, will be invited to participate in the three day event.
Despite the commitment of the United Nations and its member nations to achieve the Millennium Development goals by 2015, progress on three of the goals related to health is yet to be realized. Sub-Saharan Africa continues to bear the burden of a high prevalence of HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, and Ebola and faces an emerging prevalence of non-communicable disease such as cardiovascular diseases and diabetes. The challenges posed by this dual burden of disease and its demographic, economic, social and epidemiological impacts are enormous in a continent facing resource-constrained health systems. This conference will place particular focus on the socio-environmental and geopolitical factors affecting health conditions in Africa. Specific papers will examine these factors from different theoretical perspectives, including disease ecology, the demographic transition model, the epidemiologic transition and nutrition transition frameworks as well as globalization. Conference findings will be widely disseminated with the intent to advance recommendations for the "Post-2015 Development Agenda". The conference will also provide a forum to launch collaborative initiatives for mitigating the dual burden of disease in sub-Saharan Africa.
