The attainment of the Millennium Development Goals has been hampered by the lack of skilled and well-informed health care workers in many developing countries. The departure of health care workers from developing countries is one of the most important causes. This handbook is intended to enable institutions to adapt quality assurance principles in accordance with their local resource capacity. The handbook addresses six minimum requirements that a higher education course should incorporate to ensure that it meets internationally recognised standards: recruitment and admissions, course design and delivery, student assessments, approval and review processes, support for students and staff training and welfare. It is hoped that the handbook will contribute to providing a skilled and sustainable health care workforce that would reduce the need for health care workers to travel overseas in search of good higher-education courses. The principles outlined in the handbook should provide a sound regulatory framework for establishing local, quality higher education courses.
Useful Resources
This toolkit looks at elements necessary when creating conditions for the participation of people living in extreme poverty. These include: a lack of expectation of the contribution of people living in extreme poverty (the position of individuals and families living in extreme poverty is affected by the way society views them), reaching out, time and flexibility (people living in extreme poverty are often difficult to include in participatory projects), respecting and ensuring everyone's freedom by acknowledging that the very nature of such a project means that the different participants are from the beginning in a situation of inequality, a will to create equal partnerships and involvement at every stage - to succeed in achieving a truly participative approach, the participation of people living in poverty should be an integral part of the process rather than an add-on at any given stage.
The ability to define and measure humanitarian impact is essential to providing operational agencies with the tools to systematically evaluate the relative efficacy of various types of interventions. This guide aims to provide practitioners with a broad framework for carrying out project-level Participatory Impact Assessments (PIA) of livelihoods interventions in the humanitarian sector. The PIA approach consists of a flexible methodology that can be adapted to local conditions. It also acknowledges local people, or project clients, as experts by emphasising the involvement of project participants and community members from the outset. The proposed framework provides an eight stage approach, and presents examples of tools which may be adapted to different contexts.
STAR is a scheme which makes scholarly publications more widely available to those who have difficulty affording them. It is aimed at Individual academics in sub-Saharan Africa who would like to gain access to cutting-edge research in a wide variety of subject areas. Benefits include FREE access to over 300 Taylor & Francis Group journals online, including all physical science and technology titles, reduced rate personal print subscriptions to over 100 Taylor & Francis journals, covering subjects from archaeology to women's studies, and ongoing special offers. If you register at the address above, you’ll also receive regular news updates on the benefits available.
This is the fourth in a series of technical briefings, produced by the Association of Public Health Observatories (APHO), designed to support public health practitioners and analysts and to promote the use of public health intelligence in decision making. APHO Technical Briefings looks at key issues to consider when setting targets in a multi-agency environment, including the choice of appropriate methodologies, indicators and statistics, and consideration of the wider political and ethical context.
This guide is intended to be a short, practical resource for anyone in any health system who is responsible for using indicators to monitor and improve performance, systems or outcomes. After reading this guide, you should be able to assess the validity of the indicators you are working with, allowing you to exert more control over the way your organisation is properly judged, regulated and run. Underlining all this is the reality that anyone working in a health system is working in a complex and political environment. This guide aims to balance what is desirable, in terms of using indicators in the most correct and most rigorous way, with what is practical and achievable in such settings.
This guide argues that it is both necessary and feasible to remove user fees in order to help poorer people access basic healthcare. It also looks in detail at the case of Uganda, which removed user fees (discontinuing the policy of cost-sharing) in 2001. Using data from a range of countries and worked examples, it demonstrates how to estimate the effect of removing fees on utilisation and the resulting resource requirements. It describes five steps to follow to successfully remove user fees and maximise utilisation of health services: Analyse your starting position, estimate how removing fees will affect service utilisation, estimate additional requirements for human resources and drugs, mobilise additional funding, communicate the policy change and carefully manage the communication process.
Locally based Kenyan professionals and those in the Diaspora will now have the opportunity to exchange ideas and share knowledge following the launch of a Kenyan internet-based resource centre, the Kenya Knowledge Network (KNET). KNET will be an e-forum for debating major policy issues, where qualified subject matter specialists in the key areas of the Kenyan economy and its development management challenges can meet. The aim is to enable KNET to harness knowledge for development by establishing a community of practice, consisting of policy and research centres, professionals, policy makers and practitioners, and academics, who will participate in the formulation and management of development policies and programmes in Kenya. The website is not accessible to users just yet.
If you or your colleagues are facing difficulty in your project monitoring and evaluation reports, the Reporting Skills and Professional Writing Handbook (2nd Edition) is a self-study programme based on the best of ten years' experience running hundreds of training courses. There's a free download of the first module and you need to sign up to receive the remaining modules, free. It is designed to save time and help your team turn out more effective progress and evaluation reports. The programme is also available on CDROM for convenient desktop study, and, for larger organisations, the Trainer Edition is supported by a complete Training Pack.
GuideStar International (GSI) seeks to illuminate the work of civil society organisations (CSOs) around the world. It is based in the UK. Their new website, in co-operation with the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA), was started as a joint venture to develop a free web portal for African civil society, showcasing NGOs, charities, non-profit organisations and community-based organisations, ranging from the smallest to the largest. Utilising a shared internet platform, organisations will be able to display their vision and mission, objectives, activities, needs and finances to donors, researchers, policy makers and the general public.