GEGA Activities

Asian Social Forum was a massive event which attracted the
participation of about 12,000 social activists from India and other Asian
countries. The Forum which was organised from 2nd to 7th Jan. 2003,
provided space for hundreds of parallel seminars and workshops. The health
themes of the fora included; 'Right to Health Care - Moving from Idea to
Reality' and 'Taking the People's Health Movement (PHM) forward'. Health
activists from India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka actively participated in
these events as part of the process of developing the people's health
movement.

Training Opportunities and Tools

Training Manual on Effective Writing available online. This training manual was developed for people working in the non-profit sector. The manual is available free online, in English, French and Spanish, at http://www.fahamu.org. It looks at three specific areas: 1. writing for change, 2. writing for science and 3. writing for advocacy. The sections on advocacy will likely be especially useful for Gauges.

The Media - A tool for change? by Taj James. The tool is designed to be used by groups of people supporting youth empowerment. It addresses the question of; how can people use the media to work to produce, analyze, and control information so that power ultimately resides in the hands of young people? Visit website http://www.comminit.com/st2002/sld-5047.html.

Health Impact Assessment Training Course, The Foresight Centre Liverpool March 10-14 2003. IMPACT the International Health Impact Assessment Consortium is holding a 5 day training course aimed at all those whose work is likely to require an understanding of the theory and practice of health impact assessment (HIA). The course will be of interest to policy makers and practitioners in the fields of regeneration, sustainability, public health, health promotion, housing, planning, environmental issues and socio-economic issues, from statutory, voluntary and business sectors. Further information and booking form can be down loaded from www.ihia.org.uk OR http://www.ihia.org.uk/document/HIA_TrainingCourse8_Flyer.pdf or contact them at impact@liv.ac.uk.

Articles

Statistical Issues in Allocating Funds by Formula. Thomas A. Louis, Thomas B. Jabine, Marisa A. Gerstein, Editors. US Committee on National Statistics (CNSTAT). Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education. Washington, D.C. - 2003 Available online at: http://www.nap.edu/books/0309087104/html/ ".... Use of a formula (rather than a possibly arbitrary specification of amounts to be given to recipient jurisdictions) facilitates informed debate and a degree of transparency about the allocation process by providing documentation of assumptions and computations. Furthermore, a formula offers legislators an effective way of explaining the allocation process to their constituents. However, when funds are allocated according to a formula, there is no guarantee that objectives will be fully met. In particular, properties of data sources and statistical procedures used to produce formula inputs, can interact in complex ways with the formula features to produce consequences that may not have been anticipated or intended. This report identifies key issues concerning the design and use of formulas for fund allocation and advances recommendations for improving the process..."

Life Course Health Development:: An Integrated Framework for Developing Health, Policy, and Research. Neal Halfon and Miles Hochstein, Univ of California, Los Angeles. The Milbank Memorial Fund Qrtly J of Public Health and Health Care Policy Vol 80 No 3, 2002. Available at: http://www.milbank.org/quarterly/8003feat.html. "...This article describes the Life Course Health Development (LCHD) framework, which was created to explain how health trajectories develop over an individual's lifetime and how this knowledge can guide new approaches to policy and research. Based on the relationship between experience and the biology and psychology of development, the LCHD framework offers a conceptual model for health development and a more powerful approach to understanding diseases. Throughout this article, the authors illustrate how risk factors, protective factors, and early-life experiences affect people's long-term health and disease outcomes......"

Evaluating Communication for Social Change: An Integrated Model for Measuring the Process and Its Outcomes. How do you evaluate communication activities and strategies? The 1st Communication for Social Change Working Paper from The Rockefeller Foundation provides a process for measuring the outcomes of communication interventions. The Paper includes sections on: An Integrated Model - eg Communication as Dialogue, Collective action; Social Change Process Indicators - eg Community dialogue and action process matrices; and, Social Change Outcome Indicators - eg social norms, information equity. A number of sample 'evaluation forms' are included. Available free of charge from The Rockefeller Foundation. To obtain, email with your complete mailing address to wpaper@rockfound.org specifying you are requesting publication #4371 - Integrated Model.

How IMF Policies Block the Global Fund. Equinet reports: …Uganda's Ministry of Finance made it virtually impossible for the Ministry of Health to accept a grant from the Global Fund to fight AIDS, TB and Malaria, a grant that could help to make antiretroviral drugs available. "Any new donor monies absorbed into a government sector must be accompanied by a similar reduction within the sector in order to keep the expenditure limit," said Francis Tumuheirwe, director of budget in Uganda's ministry of finance. In other words, if Uganda gets the $52 million it asked from the Global Fund, it will simply reduce its own contribution to the health budget, which will remain the same, with or without Global Fund monies. This means that President Museveni can call for as much international financial support for antiretroviral therapy as he wants, but as long as his own Ministry of Finance is firmly committed to an International Monetary Fund and World Bank public health budget that doesn't exceed $9 per person per year - "no matter how much donors are willing to provide" - the inaccessibility of antiretroviral therapy, described as a 'genocide' by the President himself, will continue. Further details: http://www.equinetafrica.org/newsletter/newsletter.php?id=1043.

NGOs, Funders, & Filmmakers: Jointly Crafting Tools for Social Action Agendas by Pat Aufderheide. Funders, mediamakers and nonprofit organisations in the U.S. and internationally have increasingly formed teams to produce highly strategic, often interactive, but still rich storytelling media. Propelling this teamwork has been a combination of new technologies, changing funder strategies in which funders have often taken the initiative in designing projects, and the awareness of nonprofit organisations that media are central to any strategic objective. Visit Website for more information; http://www.comminit.com/st2002/sld-6479.html.

Tracking Routes Towards Impact: Research to Policy Linkages. A summary of reports is available from http://www.id21.org/id21-info/impact/summary.pdf; full report at http://www.id21.org/id21-info/impact/report.pdf. Research on international development investigates new policies and strategies that can help in the fight against global poverty and for a better standard of living for all. But there is little point to this research if it is not communicated effectively to the people who have the ability to act on its recommendations and implement the necessary changes. Who are these people, what types of research are they interested in, and what are the best ways to communicate this research to them? In early 2002, id21, the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex, set about addressing these questions by surveying, interviewing and collecting comments from over 1900 NGO and aid agency staff, politicians, policy-makers, students and researchers. The results of these surveys have now been analysed to produce a comprehensive set of insights into how development research and its effective communication can influence policy and help bring about social change.

A special supplement of Health Policy and Planning was published in December 2002. This supplement focuses only on issues in lower and middle income countries, and includes several articles authored by Gauge members and associates. Abstracts and access to full text for subscribers available at: http://heapol.oupjournals.org/content/vol17/suppl_1/. Titles include

Patterns of Global Health Expenditures: Results for 191 Countries. Jean-Pierre Poullier, Patricia Hernandez, Kei Kawabata, William D. Savedoff EIP/HFS/FAR - Discussion Paper No. 51 World Health Organization - November 2002. http://www3.who.int/whosis/discussion_papers/pdf/paper51.pdf. With good national data on the sources and uses of funds in the health systems, it is possible to begin answering questions such as the best ways to allocate limited resources toward improving health or what level of funding is needed in particular epidemiological and demographic contexts. At the national level, such data clarifies who is actually paying for health; how much they are paying, and who is actually benefiting from the services provided. This empowers governments by helping them to make decisions based on evidence and, at the same time, generates the possibility that they can be held accountable. The main tool for collecting and organizing the necessary data is National Health Accounts (NHA), an integrated set of cross-classifications that systematically measure financial flows in a country's health system....

Human Resources Impact Assessment. http://www.who.int/bulletin/pdf/2002/bul-7-E-2002/80(7)525.pdf. Many decision-makers readily point to human resource problems as the chief bottleneck they face in attempting to scale up health systems. Yet time and again the reform agenda neatly skirts around the sensitive and difficult issues involved-not least because there are major gaps in the knowledge base required for a realistic workforce strategy. This editorial of the World Health Organisation Bulletin provides an overview of the role of human resources within the health sector, regardless of whether it is public or private. The editorial discusses the importance of human resources management within the health sector, and suggests that policy-makers and donors concerned with human resources problems may want to request those proposing a major new project or policy to make a systematic and formal 'human resource impact assessment' during its preparation. Such assessments would examine the likely effects of the proposed project or policy on the health workforce.

Websites

id21 is a fast-track research reporting service funded by the UK Department for International Development (DFID) http://www.id21.org/id21-info/index.html. It aims to bring UK-based development research findings and policy recommendations to policymakers and development practitioners worldwide. Online, in print and through the southern media, id21 showcases recent research findings and policy lessons on major development issues. The online service provides free access to an online searchable database of recent research on international development issues; the combined knowledge of over 40 university research departments, institutes, private consultants and voluntary sector researchers; non-partisan, one-page research 'highlights', free of jargon, written in plain English, quick to read and easy to understand; and e-mail addresses, telephone and fax numbers, hyperlinks to and information about source materials to ease the flow of knowledge and advice between researcher and research user.

Gender and Health Equity website http://www.ids.ac.uk/ghen/. Partners: The Rockefeller Foundation, BBC World Service Trust, The CHANGE Project, CIDA, The European Union, Exchange, FAO, Johns Hopkins University Center for Communication Programs, OneWorld, The Panos Institute, PCI, Soul City, The Synergy Project, UNAIDS, UNICEF, USAID, WHO. Chair of Partners Group: Denise Gray-Felder, Rockefeller Foundation dgray-felder@rockfound.org Director: Warren Feek wfeek@comminit.com Website: http://www.comminit.com

One World Programmes. OneWorld is a community of over 1250 organisations working for social justice. OneWorld is an online media gateway that informs a global audience about human rights and sustainable development to bring together a global community working for sustainable development and to give a voice to those typically overlooked by mainstream media and policy-makers. For more information visit http://www.oneworld.net/programmes

Free Access to online information through Highwire Press-A Community Of Online Scientific Journals, at http://www.highwire.org/. Stanford University Libraries' HighWire Press began in early 1995, and now produces 346 sites online, with many more planned. The journals HighWire supports focus on science, technology, and medicine (STM). Under the guidance of its publishing partners, HighWire's approach to online publishing of scholarly journals is not simply to mount electronic images of printed pages; rather, by adding links among authors, articles and citations, advanced searching capabilities, high-resolution images and multimedia, and interactivity, the electronic versions provide added dimensions to the information provided in the printed journals.

DynaMed provides free access to medical reference information on 1,791 clinical topics via the Internet for health care professionals in developing countries. The database has information on over 2,000 diseases with a primary care focus. The information is updated daily through systematic literature surveillance. Further details: http://www.equinetafrica.org/newsletter/newsletter.php?id=1017

Conferences

WIDER Conference on Inequality, Poverty and Human well-being. World Institute for Development and Economic Research (WIDER) Helsinki, Finland, 30 - 31 May 2003. An international conference on recent advances in analytical concepts and research on inequality, poverty and human well-being. See: http://www.eldis.org/news/adverts/28-01-03unu.htm

Action

The People's Health Movement and International People's Health Council launched The Million Signature Campaign- A march on the Internet demanding HEALTH FOR ALL NOW! "In the next 24 hours, over 30,000 children will die from preventable diseases on our planet earth.… we know why they are dying; we know who are responsible for these deaths. We know how these deaths can be stopped For more information visit www.TheMillionSignatureCampaign.org.

Call for Papers

Journal of Ambulatory Care Management calls for papers for a special issue
focusing on the interaction between health behaviors and socio-cultural,
geophysical, and environmental systems. The theme is the "practice of
developing systems to support healthy communities." The purpose of this
issue is to build the readers understanding of the need for interventions
at multiple levels to improve health status, eliminate health disparities
and to improve quality of care. We will focus on practical applications
that tie the ambulatory health setting with any and all parts of the
community of which it is part. The editors seek manuscripts that describe
practical approaches to building or modifying systems at multiple levels,
including health care systems, social (community based) systems, cultural
systems, and geophysical systems that enhance health behavior decisions of
individuals.Topics for submission may include but are not limited to
Partnerships and/or Collaborations, Innovative Approaches to the use of
Data and Technology, Interface between Social/Behavioral Determinants of
Health and the Health Care System, Geophysical Environment and Health
Behaviors. This special issue will include 10 to 12 articles including original
studies, brief reports, and perspectives. One page proposals for manuscripts should be submitted by March 1, 2003 to: Celia Larson at celia_larson@mhd.nashville.org or Norbert Goldfield at nigoldfield@mmm.com. The submission deadline for full papers is July 1, 2003.

 

See you next month..!