The Guardian, a leading newspaper in the United Kingdom, has launched a new blog on Africa, where participants will debate and discuss contentious issues such as quality of leadership, the legacy of colonialism, identity politics that pitch women's and homosexuals' rights against a form of cultural fundamentalism. What is "Africa" anyway and should it look east, or west, or within? This is one of the main questions posed by this blog. The Guardian intends to showcase strong, sometimes conflicting opinions from inside and outside the continent in collaboration with a dozen independent sites. Partners include solo bloggers from Uganda and Nigeria, collectives from South Africa and Zimbabwe, and pan-African commentators. Some are from established institutions such as the Royal Africa Society's African Arguments or media groups such as the Mail & Guardian's ThoughtLeader and the online magazine Think Africa Press. There's also the development blog A View from the Cave, voices from the diaspora in Africa on the Blog, and the resource site Africa Portal.
Useful Resources
This platform, launched and run by the United Nations’ programme, The World We Want 2015, is an open and inclusive consultation space to discuss the role of health in the post 2015 development agenda. The platform is hoping to draw a representative cross section of views and start to build consensus in five key areas: What are the lessons learnt from the health related MDGs? What is the priority health agenda for the 15 years after 2015? How does health fit in the post 2015 development agenda? What are the best indicators and targets for health? And how can country ownership, commitment, capacity and accountability for the goals, targets and indicators be enhanced? The platform is co-convened by the World Health Organisation and the United Nations Children’s Fund, in collaboration with the Government of Sweden, and will run from October to March 2012.
Help promote open access research in your work environment by downloading one or the posters on this webpage by Biomed Central, a United Kingdom-based publisher specialising in publishing open access online research. You can print the posters out and display them prominently around your lab, your department and your library to raise awareness of the need for open access research, as well as encourage your colleagues to submit their papers to BioMed Central's journals, which are all open access, so their research will be available to everyone free of charge.
This guide has been produced for health activists who want to improve the response to the HIV-related needs of men who have sex with men (MSM) in Africa. It provides a set of activities that may be used when facilitating a meeting with key stakeholders who are responsible for improving local and national responses to HIV among MSM. It includes step-by-step advice about how to run sessions, together with a variety of useful resource material and presentations. It also provides basic information to increase one’s understanding about MSM and, in particular, MSM and the HIV epidemic. The guide is designed to help participants: explore their own attitudes and feelings about working with MSM; identify what is being done already, or has been done elsewhere, that could be usefully adapted to their local setting; and identify and plan a course of action in response to local situations.
This free online course is available in English and French and is intended to expose the participant to basic concepts, issues, and standards related to gender equality in the health workforce. Participants will need to complete a free registration to take the course.
This free online course provides a basic introduction to monitoring and evaluation concepts and how they apply to the field of human resources for health to inform evidence-based planning and decision-making. Participants will need to complete a free registration to take this course.
This website contains up-to-date data on global child mortality estimates. On the website, you can download the latest estimates on child mortality by the United Nations Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation. Also available for download: under-five mortality rate: country info summary, estimates and 90% uncertainty intervals; infant mortality rate: country info summary, estimates and 90% uncertainty intervals; sex-specific under-five mortality rate: estimates; neonatal mortality rate: estimates; and annual rate of reduction of under-five mortality: estimates and 90% uncertainty intervals.
Making or acting in your own film is possible with an innovative project in downtown Johannesburg, South Africa. The Home Movie Factory is a space in which anyone can go to make a movie. The project is free and is open to interested individuals or school groups, or orgabisations. The process takes about three hours from your entry into the Factory to the watching of your short movie, which will probably be between 10 and 20 minutes long. Arriving at the Factory, you start in the meeting rooms where your group’s ideas will be workshopped into a script. Each person will take a different role as the process unfolds - you may want to act, you may want to operate the camera, or you may want to be a timekeeper. You will then make use of the sets available to construct your movie and an hour or two later you will be able to watch it. The project runs for two months, starting on 1 September 2012.
The aim of this scoping review is to investigate and report stakeholders' objectives for planning or participating in large multi-day conferences and how these objectives are being evaluated. The authors conducted a scoping review supplemented by a small number of key informant interviews. Eight bibliographic databases were systematically searched to identify papers describing conference objectives and/or evaluations, 44 of which were included in this study. The evaluation framework connects five key elements in planning a conference and its evaluation: conference objectives, purpose of evaluation, evaluation methods, indicators of success and theories/models. The authors found that conference objectives and evaluations were largely correlated with the type of conference (i.e. academic, political/governmental or business) but diverse overall. While much can be done to improve the quality and usefulness of conference evaluations, there are innovative assessments that are currently being utilised by some conferences and warrant further investigation. This review provides conference evaluators and organisers a simple resource to improve their own assessments by highlighting and categorising current objectives and evaluation strategies.
This film reconstructs the narrative of how a dalit women’s collective in Karnataka, a small village in Belgaum district, defied class, caste and gender barriers and rose up against the failing public health system. The film draws from the rich and first hand experiences of the village women who, with the support of various village level peoples’ organisations and activists, stake claim to their health entitlements. The film concludes by asserting the importance of people’s struggles in creating a functional, responsive, people-centric health care systems and in the larger context of holding the State accountable for its duties and responsibilities towards its citizens. This film was one of the outcomes of the efforts to address the issue of health as a human right and taking forward the issue of revitalizing the public health system by various state and national level networks and activists. Karnataka state unit of the People’s Health Movement(JAA-K) screened this film extensively to intensify their Health as a Human Right campaign. Other health activists drew ideas from it to carry out similar actions to get their local government health centres functioning.