Underdeveloped regions of the world are plagued by a high prevalence of communicable diseases. Their deleterious effects on the quality of human life in such areas are clearly observable, making this a phenomenon worthy of sustained investigation. While no single factor determines the success or failure of development in a region, social scientists have attributed a measurable reduction in development capabilities to the enormously suppressive economic, social and psychological burdens of these communicable diseases. The institution of the World Health Organization, an agency of the United Nations, exists with a mandate to mitigate the harms of high disease burdens upon afflicted populations. In this paper, I evaluate the efficacy of the World Health Organization (WHO)’s work combating communicable diseases in Sub-Saharan Africa through an examination of its liberal methodology. To do so, I examine the mandate and methods of the World Health Organization with the aim of comprehending how its institutional features successfully promote consensus building and collaboration between domestic and international actors. I conclude that the WHO’s success stems from its entrenched philosophy of liberalism, an international relations perspective focused on creating cooperative ties between international actors. This finding is significant because it provides insight into how the social nature of communicable diseases makes international cooperation within all relevant political levels of analysis an indispensible component of disease management strategies.
The double burden household in sub-Saharan Africa: maternal overweight and obesity and childhood undernutrition from the year 2000: results from World Health Organization Data (WHO) and Demographic Health Surveys (DHS)
