Campaign for health rights: Promoting and protecting the right to health care of indigenous people in Congo-Brazzaville.

As part of the campaign for the right to health care initiated by the People Health Movement, with the support of the Association for Health and Environmental Development in Cairo, Egypt, a working group run by AZUR Development and other associations working in the domain of health and HIV/AIDS, has been working together with an association of indigenous people in Brazzaville for over a month.

While other African countries running this programme concentrate on the right to healthcare in general, this working group is concerned specifically with health rights of indigenous people.

Indigenous people in all areas of Congo Brazzaville live in precarious conditions and are subjected to discrimination and marginalisation, which prevents them from benefiting from all the rights recognised by international human rights instruments, particularly the right to health care and other interdependent rights.

The work of this group can be summed up in three steps :
An initial data collection phase, a second phase consisting of analysis of data collected in public administrations and international organisations concerned with issues affecting indigenous peoples, and a third phase of reporting and making recommendations.

The data collection phase is already well underway. The data collected is concerned not only with commitments made by the Congolese government to protect the right to health care in general, policies put in place to deliver on these commitments and budgetary allocations at national and regional level, but also with availability of sanitary equipment and medical personnel in the areas where indigenous peoples live. The working group will also take a look at how accessible health centres are to indigenous people.

The group is still in the first phase of the project. Despite some practical difficulties, some data is already available. Meetings are planned in the near future to analyse the data.