Global/Local: What does it mean for global health educators and how do we do it? 

This was a workshop sponsored by University of Maryland, Baltimore and USAID's Global Health Fellows Program II at the 2015 Consortium of Universities for Global Health (CUGH) annual conference.

On March 25, 2015, in Boston, organizers from the University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB) and USAID's Global Health Fellows Program II held a half-day pre-conference workshop for global health faculty members and global health program administrators at universities and organizations.

The session was designed as a working meeting to study a concept that has become a mantra in global health education – global/local. A review of the literature indicates that very little work has been done to define the conceptual link between global and local health education and practice. This gap has led to a number of downstream consequences, including siloed global health and community health educational programming; an absence of university and educational models that successfully link global and local health; limited pathways for sharing lessons and innovations from the local level to the global level and vice versa; and rigid career paths that limit movement between both fields.

From a theoretical perspective, global/local implicates multiple academic fields and areas of scholarship including: global and public health, global citizenship, service and experiential learning, and context and cultural awareness among others. The pre-conference session will feature speakers who will discuss the issue of global/local from multiple perspectives to set the stage for multiple interactive sessions in which participants will share their thoughts and ultimately, as a group, arrive at some conclusions and best practices regarding global/local education and practice that can be shared with a greater audience. Some main questions posed include: How are universities, community partners, and NGOs using the term global/local and why is it so important now? What are the substantive differences between working in global health and community public health? How can universities and NGOs operationalize the link between global and local and what are some successful models?

Download Summary and full reports and workshop presentations.