PLoS ONE 9(1): e87262. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0087262
Prioritise education in conflict-affected areas:
Across the world 28 million1 primary school-age children living in conflict-affected countries are
out-of-school, and they form half of the world’s total out-of-school population. During conflict,
infrastructure assets such as schools are damaged... or completely destroyed during fighting. Children
may choose to stay away from school due to their and their family’s safety fears in the midst of
conflict, or the need to supplement their family’s income amidst conflict-related financial loss.
Children who are internally displaced by conflict face a particularly challenging task accessing
education due to the specific conditions created by their displacement, such as loss of livelihoods
making school fees hard to find, and discrimination from host communities. Children caught in
conflict are being deprived of their right to education2 and denied the opportunity to benefit from the
protective and life-sustaining mechanisms of education.
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This report presents data and outlines best practices and policies that can put governments on the path to providing every child with the best start in life. It outlines the neuroscience of early childhood development (ECD), including the importance of nutrition, protection and stimulation in the ea...rly years. And it makes the case for scaling up investment, evaluation and monitoring in ECD programmes. The report concludes with a six-point call to action for governments and their partners to help maximize the potential of the children who will build the future – by making the most of the unparalleled opportunities offered by the early moments in life.
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October 2009 | Volume 6 | Issue 10 | e1000162
International Journal of Infectious Diseases 32 (2015) 170–178
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijid.2014.11.023
1201-9712/ß 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd on behalf of International Society for Infectious Diseases. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http:...//creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/).
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Infectious Diseases of Poverty 2014, 3:42
http://www.idpjournal.com/content/3/1/42
Water security, or having the right amount and quality of water in the right place at the right time, fosters social and economic progress. Where water is sufficient to meet demand, it can promote economy wide growth and enable countries to reach their food security, energy security, and human devel...opment goals. Where it is scarce, excessive, or unclean it can exacerbate multiple dimensions of poverty. Neither of these two worlds is protected from future water crises, which are heavily influenced by changing local circumstances
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Children with disabilities in South Africa: The hidden reality is part of a multiple-country study conducted by ACPF. The study seeks to analyse how cultural, social, physical and other societal barriers prevent children with disabilities from enjoying their constitutional rights to equality, freedo...m and human dignity. It also seeks to establish opportunities and practices that could be used to address these barriers to enhance disabled children’s participation in society.
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DHS Working Papers No. 105 - Rwanda has developed and implemented many strategies at the national level to reduce the incidence of HIV in the general population. One of the main objectives of such interventions is to improve the general level of knowledge of HIV, with the hypothesis that increasing... HIV knowledge will reduce risky sexual behavior. However, there has been a concern that HIV knowledge may not necessarily reduce risky sexual behavior. Only a limited number of population-based studies describe the results of these interventions in terms of how HIV knowledge affects risky sexual behavior. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to fill in this gap, by exploring HIV knowledge and its effect on risky sexual behavior among men in Rwanda.
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This evaluation is the fifth in a series of structured evaluations of CFS and was completed as part of three-year collaboration with World Vision and Columbia University. It was conducted with Syrian refugees in an urban setting in Zarqa, Jordan during the months of February to August 2014. The CFS ...was implemented through partners and supported and monitored by World Vision Jordan. Interviews were conducted during a one-week registration period hosted by partner staff and preceded by awareness campaigns in the community. Measurement tools were selected to assess impact in three areas in line with the programme’s key objectives: (a) the protection of children from risk, (b) supporting caregivers and communities in strengthening systems of child protection, and (c) the promotion of children’s psychosocial wellbeing (including the acquisition of skills and knowledge).
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The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated and added yet another layer of vulnerability to an already dire web of vulnerabilities of girls in the African continent, which constitute about 49% of the total child population. Critically, gender equality and girls’ multidimensional vulnerability have been ...accentuated to an unprecedented level. The pandemic has triggered major concerns about the potential reversal of the strides achieved over the years towards gender equality and human development in Africa.
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Science . 2020 Sep 11;369(6509):1309-1312. doi: 10.1126/science.abe2803. Epub 2020 Sep 3.
The Fair Priority Model offers a practical way to fulfill pledges to distribute vaccines fairly and equitably
The authors state that researchers, governments and global agencies should proceed with particular care in the evaluation of candidate SARS-CoV-2 vaccines in LMICs, with effective communication to build trust and avoid generation of vaccine hesitancy. Vaccine efficacy is often highly variable betwee...n high-resource and low-resource settings
Archives of Disease in Childhood, vol.106 Issue 2
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Child marriage is a widespread practice across Turkana, a nomadic pastoralist region in Kenya. This report explores the issue through the voices of those girls affected by it.
Leptospirosis, a spirochaetal zoonosis, occurs in diverse epidemiological settings and affects vulnerable populations, such as rural subsistence farmers and urban slum dwellers. Although leptospirosis is a life-threatening disease and recognized as an important cause of pulmonary haemorrhage syndrom...e, the lack of global estimates for morbidity and mortality has contributed to its neglected disease status
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As a central component of the UNHCR Strategic Directions 2022-2026, UNHCR has identified eight focus areas for renewed attention and accelerated action, including Climate Action. This Focus Area Strategic Plan for Climate Action sets out a global roadmap for prioritized action, providing further cla...rity on UNHCR’s role and direct contribution, its asks of others, and the immediate actions the organization will take to be optimally calibrated to advance this agenda.
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Background
Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) are one of the global leading causes of concern due to the rising prevalence and consequence of mortality and disability with a heavy economic burden. The objective of the current study was to analyze the trend in CVD incidence, mortality, and mortality-to-...incidence ratio (MIR) across the world over 28 years.
Methods
The age-standardized CVD mortality and incidence rates were retrieved from the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) Study 2017 for both genders and different world super regions with available data every year during the period 1990–2017. Additionally, the Human Development Index was sourced from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) database for all countries at the same time interval. The marginal modeling approach was implemented to evaluate the mean trend of CVD incidence, mortality, and MIR for 195 countries and separately for developing and developed countries and also clarify the relationship between the indices and Human Development Index (HDI) from 1990 to 2017.
Results
The obtained estimates identified that the global mean trend of CVD incidence had an ascending trend until 1996 followed by a descending trend after this year. Nearly all of the countries experienced a significant declining mortality trend from 1990 to 2017. Likewise, the global mean MIR rate had a significant trivial decrement trend with a gentle slope of 0.004 over the time interval. As such, the reduction in incidence and mortality rates for developed countries was significantly faster than developing counterparts in the period 1990–2017 (p < 0.05). Nevertheless, the developing nations had a more rather shallow decrease in MIR compared to developed ones.
Conclusions
Generally, the findings of this study revealed that there was an overall downward trend in CVD incidence and mortality rates, while the survival rate of CVD patients was rather stable. These results send a satisfactory message that global effort for controlling the CVD burden was quite successful. Nonetheless, there is an urgent need for more efforts to improve the survival rate of patients and lower the burden of this disease in some areas with an increasing trend of either incidence or mortality.
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Data on asthma aetiology in Africa are scarce. We investigated the risk factors for asthma among schoolchildren (5–17 years) in urban Uganda. We conducted a case-control study, among 555 cases and 1115 controls. Asthma was diagnosed by study clinicians. The main risk factors for asthma were tertia...ry education for fathers (adjusted OR (95% CI); 2.32 (1.71–3.16)) and mothers (1.85 (1.38–2.48)); area of residence at birth, with children born in a small town or in the city having an increased asthma risk compared to schoolchildren born in rural areas (2.16 (1.60–2.92)) and (2.79 (1.79–4.35)), respectively; father’s and mother’s history of asthma; children’s own allergic conditions; atopy; and cooking on gas/electricity. In conclusion, asthma was associated with a strong rural-town-city risk gradient, higher parental socio-economic status and urbanicity. This work provides the basis for future studies to identify specific environmental/lifestyle factors responsible for increasing asthma risk among children in urban areas in LMICs.
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