An Analysis of Health Challenges and Recommendations for the Reduction of Health Disparities Among Vulnerable Populations in Rural Colombia

Understanding the roots of rural health inequities presents an enduring challenge among global health and development scholarship. Rural health contains various features that generalize its challenges, most prominently, shared geographic barriers and socio-economic characteristics that inform resource allocation, infrastructure, and financial incentive structures within healthcare. Still, individual nations face their own unique difficulties in rural health, which compound upon these more broadly experienced challenges to create and perpetuate health inequities. Colombia's rural health landscape is distinguished by a half-century-long epidemic of violence, while structural inequities and severe environmental degradation perpetuate poor health outcomes among its most vulnerable populations - these realities compound upon one another, and upon the general challenge of rural health, in a lethal manner. The vast health disparities Colombia experiences along geographic, socio-economic, and ethnic lines are inconsistent with the country's pledge to health as a human right and as a constitutional right and are injurious to the health and wellbeing of the nation at large. This thesis argues that health equity should be pursued in Colombia through intercultural approaches and expanded legal protections for vulnerable groups.