In 1989, the Republic of Benin was facing a great social and
economical crisis. Civil servants of all the sectors in public
administration were on strike. People did not know where to
go for their health care. Salaries were not paid for more than
six months and life for the general population wa...s very dificult.
The country was about to degenerate into civil war as a
result of the civil unrest in the country.
Thanks to the assistance from the French, and Canadian
and American Mennonite missionaries, the Bethesda Health
Centre was started in 1990 with US$ 1,000 granted by theses
partners. Today, the Health Centre of Bethesda has expanded
and has become a large Hospital in Cotonou. It hosts each
year about 100,000 patients and has developed the department
of paediatrics, ophthalmology, stomatology, cardiology,
obstetrical gynaecology, X-rays, etc. The Hospital has also
put in place an AIDS service which has been promoted by the
government to the status of an AIDS Treatment Centre.
In an integrated vision, Bethesda has established other departments.
In 1993, the Sanitation department was established
to implement sanitation and environmentally-friendly
projects aimed at reducing the high incidence of some diseases
frequently treated at the hospital. In 1996, the decision
was made to establish a micro-inance department called
PEBCo. This initiative, which currently has 10,000 clients,
uses community savings to promote income-generating activities.
Since many women were obliged to use the loans for
family needs (health care, children schooling, etc.), they were
unable to reimburse them as planned. Hence the Bethesda
non-government organization (NGO) recently began an initiative
to provide a community-based health insurance option
for the population in 2006. There are now 12,000 members.
This paper focuses on the presentation of Benin and the program,
but also describes how the project could be better improved
and what were its beneits and impacts.
Field Actions Science Reports
The journal of field actions
Vol. 4 | 2010
Vol. 4
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The COPSI project is divided into three phases: the first in which the intervention is developed, the second in which researchers evaluate the intervention in a randomised controlled trial, and the final one in which the results of the trial are analysed and disseminated.
A COPSI resource kit has ...been developed comprising the COPSI training manual for the community health workers, intervention flip chart, 14 intervention handouts, recovery stories booklet and videos about people with schizophrenia and their families telling their stories of illness and recovery in a deeply personal way.
To access the videos, please click to http://www.sangath.in/copsi/ to watch the video based in Tamil Nadu and to watch the video based in Maharashtra.
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This guide focuses on the evaluation of psychosocial programs that are aligned with two main goals: - To promote psychosocial wellbeing by promoting an environment that provides appropriate care, opportunities for development and protects children from exposure to situations that are harmful to thei...r psychosocial wellbeing, and - To respond to psychosocial problems by strengthening social and psychological supports for children who have been exposed to situations that affect their psychological development.
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Available in: English, French, Chinese, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, Thai, Korean, Tajik, Vietnamese, Uzbek
http://www.who.int/disabilities/cbr/guidelines/en/
Available in: English, French, Chinese, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, Thai, Korean, Tajik, Vietnamese, Uzbek
http://www.who.int/disabilities/cbr/guidelines/en/
Mainstreaming Gender in Water and Sanitation
How to respond to, mitigate, and prevent risks to children’s protection and well-being is a profound, if unanswered, question. Practitioners agree that it is necessary to develop or strengthen protective factors at multiple levels, such as the family, community, and national levels.
There is no question that over the last thirty years environmentaldegradation and the ecological crisis have become in our day and age apredominant sign of the times. In response to this worrisome develop-ment official documents of the Roman Catholic Church, at various lev-els, have sought to addres...s the growing ecological concern from theperspective of Catholic social teaching. Consequently references to ecol-ogy and environmental issues have surfaced in papal encyclicals duringthe last fifteen years generating national and regional responses. In theUnited States, for example, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops hasissued two pastoral statements on environmental issues in 1991 and2001. Significantly, the Catholic Bishops of the Pacific Northwest, rep-resenting Canada and the U.S. have also issued a unique internationalletter focused on a particular ecological region—the Columbia RiverWatershed. What all of these efforts hold in common is the attempt toapply Catholic social teaching to a new and disturbing phenomenon inhuman experience. The result has been an expansion of Catholic socialthought. What was once the “social question” has now become the socialand “ecological question.” This development, the effort to address ecol-ogy and environmental issues as ethical problems, is the focus of thispaper. In particular this paper will link environmental and humanecology with the concept of sustainability, with the intention of propos-ing an interpretation of the common good and a definition of sustain-ability within Catholic social teaching.
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