Search results

The World Council of Churches (WCC) offered a workshop on health and healing at the All Africa Youth Congress being held in Accra, Ghana under the theme “Africa: My Home. My Future.”

A webinar held 22 October gave space for persons with disabilities to share their reflections. Entitled “From Lamentation to Transformation,” the event, first in a series of webinars on COVID-19 perspectives, highlighted hope through stories, practical support, and social change as experienced by persons with disabilities.

African Church leaders are highlighting the need to tame the continent’s persistent post-harvest losses, as organizations point at rising food insecurity due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The World Council of Churches - Ecumenical Advocacy Alliance endorses a newly expanded collaboration on HIV between the Medicine Patent Pool and Gilead. On 4 October, the MPP announced a licence with Gilead Sciences for bictegravir, a new integrase inhibitor part of a once-daily, single-tablet HIV regimen currently filed for regulatory approval at the United States Food and Drug Administration and the European Union.

Observed on 15-22 October 2017, the World Council of Churches Ecumenical Advocacy Alliance invites churches around the world again to a Churches’ Week of Action on Food, an opportunity to pray, reflect and take action together, for food-justice across the globe.

Working as a medical doctor in his home country Malawi seems to have given Dr Mwai Makoka ideal experience for his task of programme executive for Health and Healing at the WCC. He has experience in medical microbiology, HIV and AIDS, working for both government and church-based institutions after graduating as a doctor in Malawi, a country accustomed to working with church-run hospitals.

“How can we work together, to share what it is in our hands, share the work that is before us? How can we empower one another, capacity-build our religious leaders and mobilize our congregations, to be more proactive in health-promoting issues?”

“So much has changed, and yet so much remains the same. Global public health structures have changed, yet gross inequalities still exist – between developed and under-developed countries, between rich and poor, and the vision for equitable health care still lies in the far distance. Primary health care remains a task unfinished.”

“Standing at the threshold of the Sustainable Development Goals, the WCC believes it is time for the church to reaffirm the role it has played over centuries as leader in global health, and to consolidate efforts towards health and healing for all,” says Dr Mwai Makoka, WCC programme executive for Health and Healing. Meeting in Maseru, Lesotho, on 27 February, the WCC is starting the process of developing a Global Ecumenical Health Strategy, following the legacy of churches’ high profile in health care and mission historically.

Receiving the news that Pope Francis has appointed Cardinal Peter Turkson as president of the newly created dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, the WCC expressed expectation to cooperation with the new structure, as it relates to several dimensions of work and cooperation with the Roman Catholic Church worldwide.

As they talk during a workshop in Ghana, women are collectively asking a question: “Is it not time for women and girls to raise their voices to say what they want as mothers, as widows, as single parents, and as God’s children?”

“Statelessness renders people’s vulnerability to abuse and to denial of their rights invisible to national authorities. In this sense the right to a nationality is a threshold issue for access to protection of all other human rights - almost a 'right to have rights'”, said Peter Prove, director of the World Council of Churches (WCC) Commission of the Churches on International Affairs (CCIA), following a regional training workshop on birth registration and gender discriminatory nationality laws in Africa, organized by the WCC in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 11–13 May.

The Basel University honoured Ghanaian Methodist theologian Mercy Amba Oduyoye with a doctor of theology honoris causa.

Women from churches across Africa have gathered in Kenya to focus on the achievements, challenges and opportunities of women's ministry in African churches over the past 30 years, as well as their responses to the HIV and AIDS pandemic.