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 policy brief is targeted at national governments, donors and regional and international actors to support Ebola-affected countries to transition from emergency response to recovery.
R4D conducted a thorough desk review and qualitative fiscal space analysis, 19 interviews about financing for the three diseases and the extent of alignment between public financial management systems and health policy objectives, and a validation workshop with government officials.
Tanzania’...s disease response faces a triple transition challenge: replacing donor funding, closing the resource gap that would exist even with donor funding, and more efficiently delivering on disease response objectives.
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Plan Benin used the Integrated Management for Child Illnesses (IMCI) framework in creating the project "Collaborative Approach to Community based Malaria Prevention.” The project targeted 20 pilot villages in the communes of Aplahoué and Djakotomey, with the goal of reducing maternal and infant m...ortality related to malaria in the Couffo district. In order to assess the effects of the project on the beneficiary communities, the evaluation was initiated to measure the progress and the perfomance outcomes achieved at the end of the pilot stage. The evaluation was conducted from March to April 2009.
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Shortages of healthcare workers is detrimental to the health of communities, especially children. This paper describes the process of capacity building Community Health Volunteers (CHVs) to deliver integrated preventive and curative package of care of services to manage common childhood illness in h...ard-to-reach communities in Bondo Subcounty, Kenya
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High levels of storage iron may increase malaria susceptibility. This risk has not been investigated in semi-immune adolescents. We investigated whether baseline iron status of nonpregnant adolescent girls living in a high malaria transmission area in Burkina Faso affected malaria risk during the fo...llowing rainy season. For this prospective study, we analysed data from an interim safety survey, conducted six months into a randomised iron supplementation trial. We used logistic regression to model the risk of P. falciparum infection prevalence by microscopy, the pre-specified interim safety outcome, in relation to iron status, nutritional indicators and menarche assessed at recruitment.
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Maternal Child Nutrition. 2017;e12478
This paper analyzes individual level and household level determinants of anemia among children and women in Nepal and Pakistan. Applying multivariate modified Poisson models to recent national survey data, we find that the prevalence of anemia was significa...ntly higher among women from the poorest households in Pakistan (adjusted prevalence ratio [95% CI]: 1.10 [1.04–1.17]), women lacking sanitation facilities in Nepal (1.22 [1.12–1.33]), and among undernourished women (BMI < 18.5 kg/m2) in both countries (Nepal: 1.10 [1.00–1.21] and Pakistan: 1.07 [1.02–1.13]). Similarly, children in both countries were more likely to be anemic if stunted (Nepal: 1.19 [1.09–1.30] and Pakistan: 1.10 [1.07–1.14]) and having an anemic mother (Nepal: 1.31 [1.20–1.42] and Pakistan: 1.21 [1.17–1.26]).
https://doi.org/10.1111/mcn.12478
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Vitamin A deficiency is a risk factor for blindness and for mortality from measles and diarrhoea in children aged 6–59 months. We aimed to estimate trends in the prevalence of vitamin A defi ciency between 1991 and 2013 and its mortality burden in low-income and middle-income countries.
The report explores strategies for sustaining the country’s responses to the three diseases and eventually transitioning away from external funding and programmatic support. It takes stock of Kenya’s health financing landscape and identifies opportunities and challenges for sustaining effective ...coverage of HIV, TB, and malaria services in the long run, mindful of macro-fiscal and institutional constraints. The report informs ongoing dialogue within government, including among the Ministry of Health, National Treasury, Council of Governors, and National AIDS Control Council, as well as between government and development partners.
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Under-diagnosis of asthma in ‘under-fives’ may be alleviated by improved inquiry into disease history. We assessed a questionnaire-based screening tool for asthma among 614 ‘under-fives’ with severe respiratory illness in Uganda. The questionnaire responses were compared to post hoc consensu...s diagnoses by three pediatricians who were guided by study definitions that were based on medical history, physical examination findings, laboratory and radiological tests, and response to bronchodilators. Children with asthma or bronchiolitis were categorized as “asthma syndrome”. Using this approach, 253 (41.2%) had asthma syndrome. History of and present breathing difficulties and present cough and wheezing was the best performing combination of four questionnaire items [sensitivity 80.8% (95% CI 77.6–84.0); specificity 84.7% (95% CI 81.8–87.6)]. The screening tool for asthma syndrome in ‘under-fives’ may provide a simple, cheap and quick method of identifying children with possible asthma. The validity and reliability of this tool in primary care settings should be tested.
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Preferred product characteristics” (PPCs) are key tools to incentivize and guide the development of urgently needed health products. The PPC published here describes the characteristics of new types of insecticide-treated nets (ITNs) to control malaria transmission in areas with insecticide-resist...ant mosquito populations. The document was developed to address the public health need caused by the evolution and spread of insecticide resistance, particularly to pyrethroids. Such resistance threatens the effectiveness of the current standard of malaria vector control in many countries, namely pyrethroid-only long-lasting insecticidal nets (LLINs).
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