Kofi Annan, former Secretary General of the UN, said in 2006 “Cartoons make us laugh. Without them, our lives would be much sadder. But they are no laughing matter : They have the power to inform, and also to offend.” With Plantu, French editorial cartoonist at “Le Monde” newspaper, he gathered together twelve of the greatest international cartoonists at the United Nations Headquarters in New York on October 16, 2006, at a symposium entitled “Unlearning Intolerance”. The Cartooning for Peace initiative started with this meeting. It aims to promote a better understanding and mutual respect between people of different cultures and beliefs using editorial cartoons as a universal language. Cartooning for Peace facilitates meetings of professional cartoonists of all nationalities with a wide audience, to promote exchanges on freedom of expression and recognition of the journalistic work of cartoonists. Cartooning for Peace also provides protection and legal assistance to cartoonists working in difficult environments, as well as advice and support in the exercise of their profession.
Useful Resources
The WHO has launched its Health in All Policies Training Manual. The manual provides a resource for regional and country training workshops to increase understanding of HiAP by health professionals and others. WHO is developing a global plan to raise awareness among the end-users regarding this tool, and is seeking to consolidate a strong network of institutions to support responses to training requests at national and sub-national levels.
ND-GAIN ranks 175 countries both by vulnerability and readiness to adapt to climate change. The group measures vulnerability by considering the potential impact of climate change on six areas: food, water, health, ecosystem service, human habitat and infrastructure. The readiness rank weights portions of the economy, governance and society that affect the speed and efficiency of adaptation projects.The project presents this information through a series of interactive maps and rankings.
This page provides an election map where users can click on highlighted countries on the map for pop-up fact boxes and links to recommended reading, a timeline where users can scroll through for a chronological view of the year’s elections. There is also an area for further reading providing space to browse a variety of articles, from survey reports to ambassadorial blog posts on electoral systems and performance, by country.
The Africa Health Budget Network is a group of African and global organizations and individuals already using or wishing to use budget advocacy as a tool to improve health service delivery in Africa. The network has three strands of work and provides formal training opportunities, events and tools. The network promotes learning and sharing within the network and coordinated and focused pressure on African leaders with respect to their health financing commitments.
On this website Okayafrica have picked some of the finest cinema originating from the continent from 2014. Some have courted controversy for their subject matter while others have been heralded as highly imaginative celebrations of Afrofuturist landscapes from the past to the present. The projects, from rising stars and celebrated auteurs alike, come from Mauritania, Ghana, South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya include documentaries, anthology films, full-length features and shorts. They address topics as varied as excessive use of police force in a South African mining community to vignettes delving into the lives of Kenya’s LGBTQI community. Each of these films (and filmmakers) are reported to push cinema boundaries in the stories they tell.
From Cote d’Ivoire in the west to Ethiopia in the east, Africa is home to some of the world’s fastest growing economies. Debates often proclaim a new era of economic boom, innovation and social opportunity for the continent. But beyond the hype, millions of people remain affected by severe poverty, and at the root of this lies a perennial problem: energy poverty. This data visualisation explores a creative way of interrogating the notion of whether hydropower could hold the key to energy access in Africa.
Instagram, the social networking service that enables its users to take pictures and videos, apply digital filters to them, and share them across Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Flickr, is becoming increasingly popular. A free application that can be downloaded onto mobile phones and tablets. Instagram currently has a predominantly young adult audience and is used as a tool to generate interest in campaigns.
Many low- and middle-income countries are seeking to reform their health financing systems to move towards universal coverage. This typically means that financing is based on people’s ability to pay while, for service use, benefits are based on the need for health care. Financing incidence analysis (FIA) and benefit incidence analysis (BIA) are two popular tools used to assess equity in health systems financing and service use. FIA studies examine who pays for the health sector and how these contributions are distributed according to socioeconomic status (SES). BIA determines who benefits from health care spending, with recipients ranked by their relative SES. In this article, the authors identify 10 resources to assist researchers and policy makers seeking to undertake or interpret findings from financing and benefit incidence analyses in the health sector. The article pays particular attention to the data requirements, computations, methodological challenges and country level experiences with these types of analyses.
In July 2013, 13 think tanks in Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Uganda embarked on a mission to strengthen their Policy Engagement and Communications (PEC) capacity. Over the course of 15 months, the think tanks worked with a mentor to diagnose their capacity needs and develop a PEC workplan to strengthen their knowledge and capacity. Work included designing and refining communciation strategies, engaging peers and external stakeholders, and leveraging tools to sharpen their strategic messaging and outreach. The work resulted in the creation of new tools, skillsets, and shared lessons and strategies. This toolkit is a collection of the knowledge generated over the course of the work. It is intended to help the 13 think tanks - and many others - continue excelling and improving in their PEC abilities. It contains guiding principles, tips and suggested approaches to help better plan, package, disseminate and evaluate PEC strategies.