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Drawing on the accounts from the World banks ‘Voices of the Poor’ this booklet looks at the intimate link between health and poverty and the need for health to be central to attempts at poverty reduction. Three key lessons are: [1] People view and value their health in a holistic sense, as a balance of physical, psychological and community well-being, consistent with the WHO view of health as ‘a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being, not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. [2] People overwhelmingly link disease and ill-health to poverty, while poverty is also seen in terms of instability, worry, shame, sickness, humiliation and powerless-ness. [3] Health is valued not only in its own right, but because it is crucial to economic survival. Other lessons include: the fact that ‘poor people’ are not homogenous and in particular women and men, and the young and old, experience poverty and ill-health quite differently. Gender differences include the fact that men access and are seen as more entitled to formal health care, while women more often draw on traditional and alternative health services or defer their own treatment. Attitudes of health staff often appalling. Humiliating treatment by health personnel who treat people as ‘worse than dogs’ was a common experience and barrier to getting treatment. Access to health facilities, rarely built in poor areas, and often too costly to access are a problem. WHO concludes that "there can be no real progress on poverty reduction, or improvement in health outcomes, unless economic and social inequities are tackled"

There is limited research into the sexual lives of mothers, particularly mothers with disabilities. This article examines the barriers to sexuality facing mothers with disabilities. These barriers include: stereotypes that disabled mothers are not sexual, lack of resources for essential aspects of parenting, and difficulty in creating time for personal and private adult activities. Recommendations are presented based on the experiences of disabled mothers.

Finding out what young people think helps to ensure that programmes and policies are more likely to meet their needs. The guide (developed to sit alongside the Dynamic Contextual Analysis resource) aims to support policy makers, programme planners and practitioners to find out more about young people's ideas, beliefs and feelings about sex, relationships and health. This toolkit sets out how to involve young people and other partners in this process, suggests ways to collect information, analyse it, and present it in a way that is likely to influence programmes and policy

This special issue focuses on the debate about community-based rehabilitation (CBR), which aims to highlight CBR practices within NGOs and church-based sectors