Enter the Untold Global Health Stories of 2025 Contest

Do you know an important global health story that’s been overlooked by the media and deserves special notice?

The Consortium of Universities for Global Health (CUGH) and Global Health NOW from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health are pleased to announce the 2025 Untold Stories of Global Health Contest. The contest is designed to give a platform to important but underreported global health stories.

CUGH and GHN share the goal of raising awareness about health issues around the world. We invite you to nominate an issue you feel deserves urgent attention, whether you’ve worked on it firsthand or come across it in your travels. The best nominations for the Untold Stories focus on a specific issue in a specific location (i.e., not global chronic disease) and should include available data and evidence, as well as contact information.

Nominations

Send us your ideas, and if we choose your issue, we’ll help you expand the audience for your issue. Submit your nomination here, with a short (150-word) statement describing the story and why it deserves more coverage and support.

Important Dates

• Submissions Open – October 7, 2024
• Nominations Deadline – November 15, 2024, at 11:59 pm EST
• Judging Complete and Winners Notified – on or about December 1, 2024

Judging

The contest will be jointly judged by CUGH and GHN, based on the entries’ newsworthiness, creativity and feasibility for coverage.

Winners

GHN will select two winning stories to cover and be published in GHN. At least 6 runners-up will also be recognized. All winning entries will be shared on CUGH's website and bulletin.

GHN will consider and share the runners up entries as sources for possible stories for coverage. GHN will cover at least one runner-up idea as a story or series of stories in GHN.

Prizes

• The winners will be announced publicly at CUGH’s Annual Global Health Conference in Atlanta, Georgia, February 20-23, 2025. 
• The 2 grand prize winners (maximum of 1 nominee per entry) will receive free registration for the CUGH conference.
• Runners-up will have short summaries included on the GHN website.

Previous Winners

GHN and CUGH began collaborating on the Untold Stories Contest in 2015; from 2016-2020, NPR’s Goats and Soda blog joined our effort to lift up underreported stories around the world. Here’s a snapshot of all of our winning nominees so far:

2024: Missing limbs, missing voices: The Forgotten Amputees of Solomon Islands, submitted by Dylan Bush and  The other mental hospital: experiences of people living with severe mental illness in drug rehabilitation ‘annexes’ in Chiapas, Mexico, submitted by Miguel Angel, Dominguez Hernandez General Practitioner, Compañeros en Salud - Partners in Health Mexico. 

2023: The devastating health effects of landmines in Zimbabwe, nominated by Misja Ilcisin and Chronic Mountain Sickness: A forgotten disease of the Andean Highlands, submitted by Dulce Alarcón-Yaquetto. 

2022: The risks to adolescent girls in Kenya and the denial of rights-based, factual, and culturally appropriate information about their reproductive health, nominated by Roopal Thaker.

2020: The need for evidence-based protocols for the treatment of stroke in low- and middle-income countries, nominated by Mariet Benade (Global Health NOW’s winner) and Aging with HIV in Kenya, nominated by Eunice Kilonzo (NPR’s Goats and Soda’s winner)

2019: Improving autism diagnosis in Turkey, nominated by Hikmet Ceyhun Göcenoğlu (Global Health NOW’s winner) and the impact of light on the quality of care that health workers deliver, nominated by Beth Ann Eanelli (NPR’s Goats and Soda’s winner)

2018: Hemophilia in developing countries, nominated by Chris Bombardier (Global Health NOW’s winner) and the recruitment of children in Colombia for cocaine production, proposed by Athena Madan (NPR’s Goats and Soda’s winner)

2017: The hidden crisis of burns in Nepal, nominated by Emaline Laney, (Global Health NOW’s winner) and deafness in developing countries, proposed by Christi Batamula and Matthew Yau  (NPR’s Goats and Soda’s winner)

2016: The paralytic disease konzo, submitted by Desire Tshala-Katumbay (Global Health NOW’s winner), and infection-related cancers in the developing world, nominated by Susan Keown (NPR’s Goats and Soda’s winner)

2015: The chronic inflammatory disease mycetoma, nominated by University of Toronto students Annie Liang and Simran Dhunna (Global Health NOW winner)

About the Sponsors

The Consortium of Universities for Global Health (CUGH) builds interdisciplinary collaborations and facilitates the sharing of knowledge to address global health challenges. It assists members in sharing their expertise across education, research, and service. It is dedicated to creating equity and reducing health disparities everywhere. CUGH promotes mutually beneficial, long-term partnerships between universities in resource-rich and resource-poor countries, developing human capital and strengthening institutions' capabilities to address these challenges. It is committed to translating knowledge into action.

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