PHM believes that entrenching human rights within domestic legislation (as in South Africa) is crucial but insufficient for the fulfilment of the right to health without meaningful community mobilisation and participation in all public matters relevant to health.
Fundamentally, real and lasting change of the kind we envisage comes from below. This entails painstaking building. capacitating and empowering of civil society organisations that are rooted in communities and assisting them to undertake critical analysis, think creatively, and act constructively and coherently to address power imbalances and other key issues relevant to health.
PHM-SA is engaged in building a broad-based popular movement for equitable resource allocation in the pursuit of universal health coverage in South Africa. At a grassroots level, PHM-SA engages in community education and mobilization to enable communities to participate meaningfully in the development and implementation of health policies. This involves critical analysis to identify key vested interests in the status quo, their means of protecting and promoting their interests, and devising creative ways of countering these.