Professor Leslie London

Professor Leslie London, for his unwavering commitment over the past 15 years to promote community participation and community voice in health systems by integrating human rights principles into Public Health teaching, research, and practice. Professor London has carried out this body of work with a wide range of civil society, community, and academic partners, both in South Africa and across the Southern African region with the goal of using research to realise the right to health for all.

A specific focus of his scholarship has been working with organisations actively campaigning to advance protections for vulnerable persons and developing and supporting a Learning Network to enable reflection and learning for best practice towards health and human rights. This has provided a platform for a range of postgraduate students to work with organisations on, for example, health equity, access to vaccines, and farm workers’ rights. Moreover, the work has generated tools and training manuals for community organisations to develop their own capacity to assert rights to participation in the health system.

What particularly characterises Professor London’s scholarship is that his work r focuses on the crucial importance of agency on the part of communities to change their conditions of vulnerability in order to attain health equity. It has also been reflected in his consistently respectful engagement with the community members with whom he works, described by one of his referees as an egalitarian rapport based on compassion, interest and engagement. Bringing together the knowledge and skills of a range of academics and community partners into a more equal relationship not only adds value to UCT’s capacity to shape public policy and fulfil its teaching and research mission.

It also enables the University to walk the talk of empowering communities. Meaningful socially responsive work, which recognises inherent power inequalities, requires hard work to build relationships of trust over time. His consistent work at UCT has enabled UCT scholarship to make knowledge generation transformative by giving voice and power to communities consistent with a human rights framework.