Sharifah Sekalala
Professor
Director of EDI
Social Inclusion Champion
Global Health Law; Human Rights; International Law and Development
School of Law
S2.25, Social Sciences Building
University of Warwick
Coventry CV4 7AL
United Kingdom
024 765 24492
I am an interdisciplinary researcher whose work is at the intersection of international law, public policy, and global health. I am primarily interested in global health crises and the impact of law in curbing inequalities. I often use a human rights framework in my analysis.
I am currently leading a Wellcome funded interdisciplinary research project on health apps in Sub Saharan Africa. The project team will evaluate the data protection regimes and engage with key stakeholders in Kenya, South Africa and Uganda, to establish the extent to which they protect their citizens’ health data, especially in cross-border Health activities. Focusing on law, bioethics, entrepreneurship, epidemiology and policy makers, the project aims to bring together various stakeholders to empirically investigate how health apps are operating in practice, whether new forms of regulation are adequate in responding to potential problems, how different stakeholders perceive the regulatory framework and how we can create better regulatory frameworks.
I am interested in supervising doctoral students whose work broadly relates to Global Health Law.
Sharifah is a Professor of Global Health Law at the University of Warwick. She is an interdisciplinary researcher whose work is at the intersection of international law, public policy and global health. Professor Sekalala is particularly focused on the role of human rights frameworks in addressing global health inequalities. Her research has focused on health crises in Sub-Saharan Africa, international financing institutions and the rise of non-communicable diseases and she has published in leading legal, international relations and public health journals. Professor Sekalala is currently the PI on a Wellcome-Trust-funded project on digital health apps in Sub-Saharan Africa. Professor Sekalala is an Associate Fellow of Chatham House’s Global Health Programme and she has consulted on human rights and health in many developing countries and worked for international organisations such as UNAIDS, the WHO and the International Labour Organisation (ILO).
Her research has also been funded by the Wellcome Trust, GCRF, ESRC, Open Society Foundation and international organisations including the International Labour Organisation and the WHO. Sharifah also sits on the Strategic Advisory Network of the ESRC.
Sharifah holds a PhD in Law (Warwick, 2012), an LLM in Public International Law (Distinction in research, Nottingham, 2006) and an LLB Honours (Makerere University, Uganda 2004). She was called to the Ugandan Bar in 2005.
- Sekalala, Sharifah, 2017. Who gets to sit at the table? Interrogating the failure of participatory approaches within a right to health framework. The International Journal of Human Rights, 21 (7), pp. 976-1001
- Sekalala, Sharifah, 2016. Responses to questions : Yes the fight for anti-HIV drugs is a fight against discrimination. Lacuna Magazine
- Sekalala, Sharifah, 2016. Yes, the fight for anti-HIV drugs is a fight against discrimination. The Conversation
- Sekalala, Sharifah, 2016. Superbugs 1, the World 0. The Conversation
- Lisk, Franklyn, ?ehovic, Annamarie Bindenagel, Sekalala, Sharifah, 2015. Health and human security : a wrinkle in time or a new paradigm?. Contemporary Politics, 21 (1), pp. 25-39
- Sekalala, Sharifah, Kirya, Monica T., 2015. Challenges in multi-level health governance : corruption in the global fund's operations in Uganda and Zambia. Hague Journal on the Rule of Law, 7 (1), pp. 141-151
- Sekalala, Sharifah, 2010. Third world access to essential medicines and the WTO general council decision of 2003. King's Law Journal, 21 (1), pp. 172-192
- Sekalala, Sharifah, 2017. Counting AIDS, UNAIDS and its use of indicators. International Studies Association Panel on Measuring global Governance, Baltimore, USA, 22-25 Feb 2017
- Sekalala, Sharifah, 2016. Contesting global governance : the World Bank and global health financing workshop on adaptation and change in global governance. Workshop on Adaptation and Change in Global Governance, Barcelona, Spain, 4-5 Feb 2016
- Sekalala, Sharifah, 2016. Institutionalising norms in global health : a case study of human rights issues in Uganda's grant to the Global Fund 2015. Brown Institute of Advanced Research: Theme on Global Health, Biari, Spain, 10-16 Jan 2016
- Sekalala, Sharifah, 2015. Who gets to sit at the table? Representation as an emerging norm in international health financing. Sociological Inquiries into International Law, University of Toronto, Munk School of Global Affairs, 9-10 Oct 2015
- Sekalala, Sharifah, 2015. Contesting crowded spaces : examining UNAIDS' use of indicators in response to the AIDS pandemic. Indicators as Ecology of Governance, New York University, New York, 6-7 Jul 2015
- Sekalala, Sharifah, 2016. Beyond Doha : seeking access to essential medicines through the WTO. World Bank
- Sekalala, Sharifah, 2016. NHS ruling addresses inequality in access to medicines. Health and Human Rights Journal
- Sekalala, Sharifah, 2016. Will Africa's new scorecard promote universal health coverage?. Health and Human Rights Journal
- Sekalala, Sharifah, Kirya, Monica T., 2013. Subsidiarity in global health governance : 'two publics' and defiance in the global fund's operations in Uganda. University of Warwick
UG Modules
- tba
Title | Funder | Award start | Award end |
---|---|---|---|
connaught - 20,400 canadian dollars in total | University of Toronto | 01 Sep 2021 | 31 Jul 2026 |
There is no app for this: There is no app for this! Regulating the Migration of Health Data in Sub-Saharan Africa | Wellcome Trust | 01 Aug 2022 | 31 Jul 2025 |
Mobility - Global Medicine and Health Research | Wellcome Trust | 17 Dec 2020 | 16 Dec 2021 |
Human rights and corruption in health systems | World Health Organisation | 24 Aug 2018 | 31 Oct 2018 |
There is no App for that: Regulating the Migration of Health Data in Africa (Funded by the Novodisk Foundation and the Wellcome Trust (Eur 1,4 million)
With the dramatic increase in the collection of health data in recent years, health apps have been promoted as offering huge advances in the health of people in the Global South, but they also pose risks to privacy and ultimately to health outcomes. The project team will evaluate the data protection regimes and engage with key stakeholders in Kenya, South Africa and Uganda, to establish the extent to which they protect their citizens’ health data, especially in cross-border Health activities.
The interdisciplinary project led by Professor Sharifah Sekalala, Professor Bitange Ndemo and Professor Pamela Andanda seeks to analyse the regulation of health apps in Sub Saharan Africa in Uganda, Kenya and South Africa. Focusing on law, bioethics, entrepreneurship, epidemiology and policy makers, the project aims to bring together various stakeholders to empirically investigate how health apps are operating in practice, whether new forms of regulation are adequate in responding to potential problems, how different stakeholders perceive the regulatory framework and how we can create better regulatory frameworks.
Visit the project page.
There is no App for that: Regulating the Migration of Health Data in Africa (Funded by the Novodisk Foundation and the Wellcome Trust (Eur-50,000)
Health apps are increasingly being used in Sub-Saharan Africa. These health apps move health data from users to third-party actors, who are often based in other jurisdictions, and this frequently means from the global south to the global north. As noted by the African Union, this happens because most African countries depend on non-African manufacturers and service providers for their mobile networks, located outside the continent.
Digital health apps create complex legal and ethical problems, because data derived from them can be used to violate people’s privacy rights and by creating the opportunity for strategic uses of data that further embed structural disadvantage. In this project I will explore the ways in which domestic regulation can address this problem.
Using three case study countries – South Africa, Kenya and Uganda – which were all early adopters of data protection laws, I will evaluate these laws in in relation to privacy, and the validity of reports that health apps are being designed to exceed the remit of this legislation.
Catalyst Fund GCRF Integrating Legal Empowerment and Social Accountability for Sexual Reproductive health and HIV Services for Young People in Selected Slum Areas in Uganda (Funded by GCRF -37,671)
Working with a domestic human rights organisation in Uganda, (CEHURD) and colleagues from Warwick Medical School, this project is an applied human rights project which analyses how adolescent women and young girls can use the human rights framework in order to gain sexual an reproductive health services. This project is methodologically novel as it aims to co-produce knowledge with local human rights organisations, and young girls and women, in the promotion of sexual and reproductive rights, thereby producing tangible benefits for the people who are our research participants.
The African Feminist Judgments Project
The African Feminist Judgment Project is coordinated by Dr Sibongile Ndashe (Initiative for Strategic Litigation in Africa, Johannesburg), Dr Sharifah Sekalala (Warwick Law School) and Professor Ambreena Manji (Cardiff Law School). It builds on similar projects (Canada, UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and USA) to draft and disseminate alternative judgments for important African landmark cases on a range of legal issues.
At the heart of the project are the following questions — what might we mean by a landmark case in the African context? What is feminist judicial practice in Africa and what might we want it to be? How might alternative feminist judgments contribute to African jurisprudence, legal practice and judicial decision-making? What are the specific Constitutional and historical contexts within which the project must be understood?
https://www.lawandglobaljustice.com/the-african-feminist-judgments-project/
Pilot Project
Tobacco use is one of the biggest public health risks globally accounting for 7 million deaths annually. Many countries are trying to curb tobacco use by introducing laws which make it harder for people to access cigarettes. These laws have been met with strong opposition from tobacco companies, followed by court challenges in Canada, Australia, UK, Kenya, South Africa and Uganda. While some research has examined individual country cases, there has been no attempt to analyze the general trends of tobacco challenges in courts at the national level. Proposed as a pilot study, this research asks, ‘How do court challenges impact on countries attempts to create anti-tobacco legislation in commonwealth countries?’ Through a doctrinal analysis of court challenges and judgments, the research will examine patterns in these cases so as to find whether they are trends in the strategies that tobacco companies are using in this litigation, what is the role of the judiciary in promoting anti-tobacco legislation, and how government and civil society organizations can best respond proactively. Project findings will be submitted to a peer-reviewed journal, published online and presented to collaborators in 2018 as the basis of a comparative Investigator Award application to the Trust in 2019.
Leaving no one behind: Interdisciplinary workshop on Universal Health Coverage (April 2017)
Universal Health Coverage (UHC) is defined by the WHO to mean that all people receive the health services they need without suffering financial hardship when paying for them. UHC will be essential to ensure that African countries achieve their targets of reducing poverty and improving health under Sustainable Development Goal 1 and 3. The Institute of Advanced Studies, GRP on International Development and the Law School sponsored a multi-disciplinary workshop which focused on the legal, ethical, economic and epistemic, limits of universal health programmes. The workshop hosted a wide range of exciting talks from a number of scholars and practitioners who are working on UHC.
I try and communicate my work to public audiences through blogs, public policy briefs and media appearances. For instance, in my current project on the human rights impact of COVID-19, I was a principal interviewee in a BBC World Service documentary on legal and ethical questions concerning the supply of a potential COVID-19 vaccine, especially in developing countries. I was also interviewed by the Daily Telegraph for a piece on equitable health funding, , MSN, The Independent, on vaccines, by Reuters on how poor housing was creating inequity within lockdowns. I also wrote several blogs on the ways in which emergency laws could better protect vulnerable groups, such as indigenous groups, health workers and migrants.
I welcome enquiries from prospective PhD supervisees. However, please ensure that you have a research proposal which corresponds with the University of Warwick School of Law requirements.
I am particularly interested in supervising research students in the broad area of global health law.
Current PhD students:
- Arrin Lewis
Human Rights Impacts of COVID-19
This work has been supported by an ESRC Impact Grant No to increase public awareness. I was one of the main interviewees in a BBC World Service documentary on legal and ethical questions about the supply of a potential COVID-19 vaccine, especially in developing countries. I was also interviewed by the Daily Telegraph for a piece on equitable health funding and by Reuters on how poor housing was creating inequity within lockdowns. I also wrote several blogs on the ways in which emergency laws could better protect vulnerable groups, such as indigenous groups, health workers and migrants.
I have also submitted written evidence to the UK Parliament on the impact of the UK’s COVID-19 emergency laws on human rights, both for UK nationals and for people abroad. These have been accompanied by accessible public policy briefs.