The 2019-2023 Strategy for UNU-IIGH, developed in
2018, built on UNU-IIGH’s strategic advantage and
position vis-à-vis the UN and global health ecosystem.
The Strategy set a goal to advance evidencebased policy on key issues related to sustainable
development and health and shifted the Instit...ute’s
body of work from investigator-driven global health
projects to three priority-driven, policy-relevant pillars
of work, each reflecting UNU-IIGH’s unique value
position.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020, the
Institute adapted and reprioritised its areas of work
while continuing to deliver on the main strategic
objectives of translating evidence to policy, generating
policy-relevant analyses on gender and health, and
strengthening capacity for local decision making
especially in the Global South.
The new strategic plan encompasses four work packages:
1. Gender Equality and Intersectionality: through this work, we will aim to improve the quality of health care through a human-centred approach, by ensuring the health system is responsive to the needs of structurally excluded individuals and communities; and by advancing a positive and enabling environment for the frontline health workforce—e.g. addressing the experience of gender-based violence.
2. Power and Accountability: through this work, we will catalyse equitable shifts in power and address key accountability deficits that prevent the equitable and effective functioning of the global health system and prevent adequate responsiveness to the needs of states and populations in the Global South.
3. Digital Health Governance: through this work, we will address the colonial legacies and power asymmetries that negatively impact robust digital health governance, identify ways to strengthen health data governance with a particular focus on SRHR and promote diversity in technology design and development.
4. Climate Justice and Determinants of Health: through this work we will leverage UNU-IIGH's position within the UN and network of UNU institutes, network experts, practitioners, policy-makers, and academics to advance evidence-based policy on the different dimensions of the climate emergency and its impact on health.
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This revised and fully updated edition of the
International technical guidance on sexuality education
benefits from a new review of the current evidence, and reaffirms the position of sexuality education within a framework of human rights and gender equality. It promotes structured learning about... sex and relationships in a manner that is positive, affirming, and centered on the best interest of the young person. By outlining the essential components of effective sexuality education programmes, the Guidance enables national authorities to design comprehensive curricula that will have a positive impact on young people’s health and well-being.
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Within an Australian context, the medium to long-term health impacts of climate change are likely to be wide, varied and amplify many existing disorders and health inequities. How the health system responds to these challenges will be best considered in the context of existing health facilities and ...services. This paper provides a snapshot of the understanding that Australian health planners have of the potential health impacts of climate change.
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How should humanitarian organisations prepare and respond to COVID-19 in humanitarian settings in low- and middle-income countries?
This Rapid Learning Review outlines 14 actions, insights and ideas for humanitarian actors to consider in their COVID-19 responses. It summarises and synthesises the... best available knowledge and guidance for developing a health response to COVID-19 in low- and middle-income settings as at April 2020
The paper, supported by the UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Mark Lowcock, will be updated throughout 2020 to reflect emerging knowledge and evidence on the most effective approaches to respond to the COVID-19 Pandemic.
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Guía para la rehabilitación basada en la comunidad (RBC)
En el 2003, una Consulta Internacional para Revisar a Rehabilitación Basada en la Comunidad, celebrada en Helsinki, hizo un número de recomendaciones. Seguidamente, la rehabilitación basada en la comunidad se volvió a posicionar con una... propuesta de posición conjunta de la OIT, UNESCO y OMS, como una estrategia dentro del desarrollo comunal general para la rehabilitación, la equiparación de oportunidades, la reducción de la pobreza y la inclusión social de las personas con discapacidad.
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Disabled people in developing countries are the poorest of the poor: if we are serious about tackling extreme poverty, our development work has to target them. The post-2015 development framework offers hope that disabled people will finally get the prominence they deserve on the global development ...agenda. But this will only be possible with sustained political pressure, and the UK’s position will only be credible if it leads by example in its own development work. Disabled people experience some of the most extreme poverty in the world, but there are also realistic opportunities for donors to turn the situation around.
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Guía para la rehabilitación basada en la comunidad (RBC)
En el 2003, una Consulta Internacional para Revisar a Rehabilitación Basada en la Comunidad, celebrada en Helsinki, hizo un número de recomendaciones. Seguidamente, la rehabilitación basada en la comunidad se volvió a posicionar con una... propuesta de posición conjunta de la OIT, UNESCO y OMS, como una estrategia dentro del desarrollo comunal general para la rehabilitación, la equiparación de oportunidades, la reducción de la pobreza y la inclusión social de las personas con discapacidad.
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Climate change (CC) impacts on health outcomes, both direct and indirect, are sufficient to jeopardize achieving the World Bank Group’s visions and agendas in poverty reduction, population resilience, and health, nutrition and population (HNP). In the last 5 years, the number of voices calling for... stronger international action on climate change and health has increased, as have the scale and depth of activities. But current global efforts in climate and health are inadequately integrated. As a result, actions to address climate change, including World Bank Group (WBG) investment and lending, are missing opportunities to simultaneously promote better health outcomes and more resilient populations and health sectors. Accordingly, with the financial support of the Nordic Development Fund (NDF), the World Bank Group set out to develop an approach and a 4-year action plan, outlined in this paper, to integrate health-related climate considerations into selected WBG sector plans and investments.
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Evidence shows that FGM can cause several physical, mental and sexual health complications in girls and women, and in newborns. Health-care providers play an important role in supporting girls and women living with FGM, and improving their health and well-being. They are in a unique position to infl...uence and change the attitudes of their patients about FGM.
WHO is committed to scaling up the health-sector response to address FGM prevention and care. One aspect is to strengthen the quality of FGM prevention and care services by building the capacity of health-care providers. Several guidance materials have been produced to target health-care providers. These include FGM content for training curricula, clinical guidelines and a clinical handbook.
This training manual complements previous publications by building person-centred communication skills specifically for FGM prevention.
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The Facilitator's Guide provides instruction and suggestions for teaching the training modules for the Technical Guidelines for Integrated Disease Surveillance and Response in the Africa Region, 2nd edition. This training is intended for district level health officers who conduct IDSR activities. Th...e course is laid out in 7 modules that walk participants through the Technical Guidelines (TGs) chapter by chapter. By the end of the course, participants will be familiar with the TGs and capable of utilizing them appropriately in their position
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The Catholic Church maintains that the Imago Dei is the ground for human dignity. The secular world, too, endorses human dignity as the foundation for human rights without referring to Imago Dei. The Catholic Church and the secular world both agree on the importance of human dignity, ev...en though they differ on their views about the source of human dignity. In this paper, we shall examine if human dignity can be the basis of a fruitful dialogue between the Catholic Church and the secular world in order to make our world a better place to live. The primary resources for our study are the Church documents on human dignity, and the opinions of distinguished thinkers on the need to promote a culture of dialogue between religions and secular world.
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African Evaluation Journal
ISSN: (Online) 2306-5133, (Print) 2310-4988
Background: For some years, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and civil society have
become increasingly involved in the fight against the HIV/AIDS pandemic in Africa. But even
though their role is well appreciated, the...ir actions are perceived as ineffective because of a lack
of monitoring and evaluation capacity.
Objective: This paper aims to describe local HIV/AIDS NGOs’ involvement in evaluation and
the characteristics of this involvement.
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This manual is designed to orient helpers to offer psychologicalfirst aid (PFA) to people following a serious crisis event. PFA involves humane, supportive and practical assistance for people who are distressed, in ways that respect their dignity, culture and abilities. PFA is an approach that can b...e learned by both professionals and non-professionals who are in a position to help people impacted by very distressing events
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The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) call for major societal transformations that will require significant fiscal outlays as well as private investments. The fiscal outlays cover public investments, the public provision of social services, and social protection for vulnerable populations. The ke...y message of this paper, building on recent reports by the IMF and SDSN (IMF, 2019b; SDSN, 2018) is that the governments of Low-Income Developing Countries (LIDCs) will require a substantial increase in fiscal (budget) revenues, far beyond what they can achieve by their own fiscal reforms. For this reason, SDG financing will require substantial international cooperation to enable the LIDCs to finance their SDG fiscal outlays. One important source of increased revenues should be the globally coordinated taxation of ultra-high-net worth assets. Today’s ultra-rich should help to pay for the survival and basic needs of the world’s poorest people.
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To enhance health co-benefits across urban policies which tackle air pollution and climate change, WHO, in cooperation with various international, national, and local partners, implemented the Urban Health Initiative (UHI) pilot project in Accra, Ghana. The Initiative prompted the health sector to u...se its influential position to demonstrate to decision-makers and the public the full range of health, environmental and economic benefits that can be achieved from implementing local emission reduction and energy access policies and strategies. Policy tracking, although not always considered, is a fundamental component of this procedure. It assesses the planning, implementation and progress of a policy to refine or adjust policies with the final objective of increasing the likelihood of the policy being successful. This report is an outcome of the last component of the UHI model process, Policy tracking and monitoring outcomes. The report proposes a framework for tracking urban health policies, with a special focus on the impacts of air quality and energy access on human health and well-being in African countries, giving some examples from the pilot project in Accra. The report also provides resources to survey air quality in cities and other tools to assess public health and the environmental impacts of urban policies and monitor or track their effects.
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Annual and medium-term budget preparation processes are the platforms through which specific plans are transformed into actual resource allocation decisions. The aim of this Process Guide is to support key stakeholders involved in these processes (such as the Cabinet, Ministries of Finance and Healt...h, the Parliament, citizens, media, and civil society organizations) to reorient budgetary arrangements in order to facilitate the ability of national governments to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic by delivering, therapeutics, diagnostics, and vaccine services to their populations. Reorienting budgetary arrangements positions governments to sustain the capacity to mitigate and respond to COVID-19 while concurrently delivering other essential health services and working towards Universal Health Coverage (UHC). The reorientation process is an opportunity to better align budgetary arrangements to sustain systemic capacity to prevent emerging health threats over the short, medium, and long terms.
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Supportive supervision is considered critical to community health worker programme performance, but there is relatively little understanding of how it can be sustainably done at scale. Supportive supervision is a holistic concept that encompasses three key functions: management (ensuring performance...), education (promoting development) and support (responding to needs and problems). Drawing on the experiences of the ward-based outreach team (WBOT) strategy, South Africa’s national community health worker (CHW) programme, this paper explores and describes approaches to supportive supervision in policy and programme guidelines and how these are implemented in supervision practices in the North West Province, an early adopter of the WBOT strategy. Outreach teams typically consist of six CHWs plus a nurse outreach team leader (OTL).
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Lesotho’s predominantly rural population faces significant health challenges within a setting of inadequate human resources for health. It is essential that nurses and nurse-midwives, who together make up the largest health workforce in the country, be adequately prepared to address Lesotho’s He...alth Priorities according to the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) in the settings where they work. Under the HRAA project, Jhpiego conducted a task analysis study to obtain data on job duties or tasks performed by these cadres, as well as information about how often the tasks are performed, if and where tasks were learned, and the self-perceived level of competence in performing the tasks.
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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.
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World Psychiatry. 2010 Jun;9(2):67-77.
The main recommendations are presented in relation to: the need for coordinated policies, plans and programmes, the requirement to scale up services for whole populations, the importance of promoting community awareness about mental illness to increase levels ...of help-seeking, the need to establish effective financial and budgetary provisions to directly support services provided in the community. The paper concludes by setting out a series of lessons learned from the accumulated practice of community mental health care to date worldwide, with a particular focus on the social and governmental measures that are required at the national level, the key steps to take in the organization of the local mental health system, lessons learned by professionals and practitioners, and how to most effectively harness the experience of users, families, and other advocates
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