South-south development cooperation: Cuba's health programmes in Africa

Abstract

Cuba's health programmes in Africa, dating back some forty years, and its training of African doctors in Cuba itself, have made an original contribution to international development Cuba's programmes have focussed heavily on capacity building within the health sector, rather than large infrastructure projects. They have been located within a distinctive discourse of solidarity among developing countries, officially repudiating the self-interest and power imbalances usually implicit in donor-recipient relations; they have been largely free from political conditionality; and their core values are preventive and holistic medicine, rather than the medical conception of health commonly seen as a legacy of colonialism in Africa. Cuba made a significant contribution to the concept of south-south development cooperation well before this concept began to influence the professional field of development studies in the 1990s - when it was identified as an alternative form of globalisation and seen as a key driver of development effectiveness in meeting the Millennium Development Goals. This brief exploration of some of Cuba's health programmes in Africa suggests that they exemplify both the strengths and limitations of south-south development cooperation, which currently accounts for between five and ten per cent of overseas development activity. </p