David Sanders, Professor and founding Director of the School of Public Health at the University of the Western Cape, (UWC), South Africa, is a specialist paediatrician with postgraduate qualifications in Public Health. He has over 30 years experience of health policy and program development in Zimbabwe and South Africa, in the areas of primary health care, child health and nutrition, and health human resources as part of health systems development. He has published extensively in these fields as well as on the political economy of health, including on structural adjustment and development aid, having authored or co-authored three books: "The Struggle for Health: Medicine and the Politics of Underdevelopment", "Questioning the Solution: the Politics of Primary Health Care and Child Survival" and “Fatal Indifference: the G8, Africa and Global Health”, as well as many chapters and journal articles He has a long involvement in capacity development of health personnel, having previously worked in the Medical Schools of the Universities of Zimbabwe and Natal.
He was on the Steering Committee of the United Nations Standing Committee on Nutrition from 2002 – 2006 and a member of the Knowledge Network of the WHO Commission on Social Determinants of Health. He is a founder member in the 1970s of the UK Politics of Health Group, of the International Peoples Health Council and of the Peoples Health Movement of which he is a Steering Council member. He was a managing editor of Global Health Watch 2. He has taught in several IPHUs, including the first in Cuenca, Ecuador and in all of the African IPHUs. He chaired the Organising Committee of the Third Peoples Health Assembly.
