Health
HealthIn order to translate global commitments of ensuring access to sexual and reproductive healthcare services for every woman and every girl into practical, affordable and sustainable interventions, policy makers and implementers need to be able to draw on solid evidence of what does and does not work. The More Mobilising Access to Maternal Health Services… Read more
This blog is written by Jo Boyden, Director of the Young Lives programme, following her speech at a forum hosted by CIFAR, the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, on November 17, 2016. The multi-sectoral forum on the well-being of the world’s children is aimed at bringing researchers, practitioners and policy makers to the table to share… Read more
Access to menstrual hygiene products is a major challenge facing women and girls in developing countries and is an aspect of water, sanitation and hygiene that is often overlooked (Crofts et al., 2012). Lack of access to menstrual hygiene products can often mean that women and girls have considerable difficulty in going about their lives… Read more
There are dramatic differences in mortality and life expectancy between and within countries. Disadvantaged groups have poorer survival chances and use facility-based services less than other groups. Community health services are an opportunity to improve this situation and create a pathway to Universal Health Coverage (UHC). Community Health Workers (CHWs) can improve equitable child survival,… Read more
E-Health or the use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) for health is increasingly being adopted in Kenya to bridge the gap in access to health services, and improve efficiency and governance of the health system in an effort to achieve better health outcomes. In Kenya, a mobile technology revolution is evolving with mobile coverage… Read more
The Ugandan Government has been recognised for adopting policies that have promoted a universal gender mainstreaming agenda. Uganda has been a relatively stable country for the last 30 years though its Northern region sustained a confined 20-year civil war. In the post-conflict setting, there is a convergence of this gender mainstreaming agenda with other dynamics… Read more
Everyone who was at the Durban AIDS conference in 2000 remembers the moment we learnt of effective medications for HIV. Some of us were too scared to believe it. But it turned out to be true and what unfolded was relatively straightforward. Life rapidly changed for people with the virus who were able access treatment…. Read more
Fatima[1] wears a yellow headscarf. She has bright eyes and a hopeful face. She is 17, has already been married for several years, had a child who died in infancy and has been divorced by her husband. She asks us if we are from India as she loves Bollywood films and wants to go to Mumbai…. Read more
The recent Ebola death in Sierra Leone takes the official death toll from the epidemic up to 11,316, though this is likely an underestimation. The news comes just days after, on the 14th January 2016, the Ebola crisis in West Africa was declared to be over. Over the past 22 months Ebola has taken the… Read more
While gender and ethics are taken into account as cross-cutting issues in many international development programmes, to date there has been very limited attention to gender in health systems. Often there is no disaggregation of data by sex and many terms such as community health workers and village health committees are gender neutral, when the… Read more
In November 2015, President Yahya Jammeh of the Gambia banned, effective immediately, the practice of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) in the Gambia. This pronouncement was made as part of activities to mark the 16 days of Activism against Gender Based Violence for 2015. The ban follows over 30 years of efforts to end FGM in… Read more