The only way to prevent future Ebola epidemics of this magnitude is to address the fundamental social and political vulnerabilities that have allowed the virus to flourish, such as weak health systems and local services, poor governance, chronic poverty, and a legacy of conflict and social divisions
his Inter Action Review report for the COVID-19 outbreak in Mauritius documents and assesses the country’s capacity to respond to the outbreak and identifies the best practices, strengths, gaps and challenges of the national response. Areas requiring improvements or sustained actions have been ide...ntified across the 9 strategic pillars of World Health Organization (WHO)’s COVID-19 Strategic Preparedness and Response Plan and an additional pillar for the country’s response beyond health. On an overall, the review aims to enhance and sustain the national response with a particular focus on strengthening the health systems.
more
DHS Working Papers No. 91
Miscellaneous
Chapter J.7
We combine data on Chinese development projects with data from Demographic and Health Surveys to study the impact of Chinese aid on household welfare in sub-Saharan Africa. We use a novel methodology to test the effect of Chinese aid on three important development outcomes: education, health, and nu...trition. For each outcome, we use difference-in-difference estimations to compare household areas near Chinese project sites to control areas located farther away, before and after receiving Chinese aid. This empirical strategy rules out many confounding factors that can bias measuring the impact of Chinese aid on our outcome variables. First, we find that Chinese projects significantly improve education and child mortality in treatment areas, but do not significantly affect nutrition. Second, social sector projects have a larger effect on outcomes than economic projects. Third, we do not find significant effects for projects that ended more than five years before the post-treatment survey wave. Our results are robust to a host of robustness checks.
more
Guidelines for WHO Representatives and Country
Offices in the Western Pacific Region
As part of a wider organisational undertaking to better capture and communicate the effectiveness of its work, Oxfam developed an evaluative method to assess the quality of targeted humanitarian responses. This method uses a global humanitarian indicator tool which is intended to enable Oxfam GB to ...estimate how many disaster-affected men and women globally have received humanitarian aid that meets establishes standards for excellence. This method was used after the independence of South Sudan, which was followed by political tensions with its neighbour on issues unresolved from the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) which include border demarcation, wealth-sharing and the fate of the disputed territory of Abyei.
more
For the primary health worker in a low/middle-income country (LMIC) setting, delivering quality primary care is challenging. This is often complicated by clinical guidance that is out of date, inconsistent and informed by evidence from high-income countries that ignores LMIC resource constraints and... burden of disease. The Knowledge Translation Unit (KTU) of the University of Cape Town Lung Institute has developed, implemented and evaluated a health systems intervention in South Africa, and localised it to Botswana, Nigeria, Ethiopia and Brazil, that simplifies and standardises the care delivered by primary health workers while strengthening the system in which they work. At the core of this intervention, called Practical Approach to Care Kit (PACK), is a clinical decision support tool, the PACK guide. This paper describes the development of the guide over an 18-year period and explains the design features that have addressed what the patient, the clinician and the health system need from clinical guidance, and have made it, in the words of a South African primary care nurse, ‘A tool for every day for every patient’. It describes the lessons learnt during the development process that the KTU now applies to further development, maintenance and in-country localisation of the guide: develop clinical decision support in context first, involve local stakeholders in all stages, leverage others’ evidence databases to remain up to date and ensure content development, updating and localisation articulate with implementation.
more
The COVID-19 pandemic has put significant pressure on health systems all around the world. The drastic measures established to contain its spread are creating serious impediments to economic activity (including agrifood systems) and, consequently, to livelihoods and food security and nutrition.