The Open Society Institute (OSI) teamed with EBSCO Publishing to launch the Electronic Information For Libraries Direct (EIFL Direct) project in october of 1993. With funding from the Soros Foundation, EIFL Direct provided a variety of the world's finest full text and bibliographic databases to Public and Academic libraries in 39 participating countries, including 10 countries in Southern Africa. But funding for continuation of this project was not made available for several Southern African countries in 2001. Recently, however, OSISA (Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa)'s ICT Program has provided the necessary funding to once again allow these libraries to enjoy access to these large collections. Moreover, the number of developing nations now accessing these databases is even larger than the original group that participated in EIFL Direct. For further details and enquiries on how your NGO can access Electronic journals, do contact Colleen Mills at EBSCO.
Useful Resources
This documentary captures such an effort done in 12 villages of Bolangir district, Orissa State, India where the community is taught as to the money that is allocated to various schemes at the community level to deliver health entitlements. Such demand for accountability is done while the community is actively engaging with the public health system within the larger processes of community mobilisation and monitoring to demand accountability from the health system. Our Health Our Money, a film produced by CHSJ showcases the work done in Odisha around decentralised monitoring of health expenditure. The film is 25 minutes, with English subtitles.
This Guide documents pioneering methodologies used by civil society organizations around the developing world to hold their governments to account for the use of public resources. Specific methodologies examined by the Guide include social audits, citizen report cards, public expenditure tracking surveys, procurement monitoring tools, and participatory auditing tools. These methodologies are considered in detailed case studies presenting the work of 17 organizations from 12 countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The Guide will enable readers to gain familiarity with the typical processes followed by national-level governments during the execution of budgets, management of procurements, measurement of impact achieved by expenditures, and oversight of budget expenditures through audits and legislative supervision. For each of these processes, the Guide provides practical tools and techniques that readers can use to monitor the results achieved by government expenditures.
This guide outlines the current state of paediatric tuberculosis (TB) care, looking at current practices, new developments and research needs in paediatric TB diagnosis, treatment and prevention. It is intended to act as a guide to treatment programmes for implementation of the best standard of care currently available to children with TB, and to raise awareness of the need to continue to push for improvements in the management of childhood TB.
At any one time, dozens of infectious disease outbreaks are happening around the world. Those on the frontlines are often more visible, but behind the scenes, many activities are taking place to control the spread of these diseases. In this special feature, the World Health Organisation highlights a series of recent health emergencies, telling the stories behind the headlines and exploring the many different dimensions of an outbreak response. Humanitarian crises, forced migration, environmental degradation, climate change, reduced access to health services and prolonged conflict often provide exactly the right conditions for an outbreak to occur. Diphtheria - a bacterial disease that is preventable through a simple inexpensive vaccine – is one such example. Dr. Khadimul Anam Mazhar working in the Rohingya refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, found diptheria to be the main focus of his work. The outbreaks of Ebola in DRC and diphtheria among the Rohingya refugees have starkly different profiles. One was a naturally occurring zoonosis in a remote area, the other the result of a major migration of a highly stressed population. For all the differences, however, they also share similar traits: prolonged conflict, inadequate water and sanitation systems, and struggling health systems. The cases highlight two critical and often overlooked issues: 1) multiple countries around the world are facing severe health crises, and 2) many of these countries have several health crises occurring at the same time. While it is critical to treat patients affected by epidemic diseases, the response is much more than purely medical. The range of necessary expertise includes epidemiologists, logisticians, clinicians, data managers, anthropologists and planners.
This knowledge translation self-assessment tool for research institutes (SATORI) was designed to assess the status of knowledge translation in research institutes. It identifies the gaps in capacity and infrastructure of knowledge translation support within research organisations. Research institutes using SATORI have pointed out that strengthening knowledge translation is paramount and may be achieved through the provision of financial support for knowledge translation activities, creating supportive and facilitating infrastructures, and facilitating interactions between researchers and target audiences to exchange questions and research findings.
PAHO has just launched a quick way for its readers to go straight to the source of what they are looking for in electronic format. They can now access one or more chapters of the organisation's most popular publications, such as Health in the Americas and Control of Communicable Diseases (Spanish version), among others, in a minimum of keystrokes. With this new service, readers can select only those chapters on the diseases that most interest them or select the chapter on a country for which they need the latest mortality or morbidity data.
This Training Companion is a result of interregional collaboration, based on concepts and illustrative examples from African cities that recently initiated participatory budgeting. The Companion provides visibility and resonance to the efforts that have been made by many anonymous women and men of Latin America to improve democracy and construct participatory governance in their own cities. The interregional collaboration in the preparation of this Companion has also generated a process of mutual learning across language groups and regions in Africa as well as in Latin America. The inputs of the various institutions, including sensitisation events and pilot workshops, underscore the multiple ownership of the publication.
Participatory budgeting in Africa is part of an effort to build the capacity of local government officials and their partners for greater accountability and good governance. This toolkit is aimed at helping local governments and other stakeholders to prepare for, design, initiate and manage a participatory budgeting process, by training key actors who initiate the budgeting processes. This is the second of two volumes that provide users with information, tools, methodologies, case studies and tips on how participatory budgeting can be introduced and sustained. These resources have been collected from local governments where participatory budgeting is already being practised.
This toolkit contains tools and resources relating to different categories of participatory governance practices, including for (1) public information, for citizens to access relevant information about government policies, decisions and actions; (2) education and deliberation; (3) public dialogue for communication between citizens and state; (4) design and implementation of public policies and plans that respond effectively to citizens’ priorities and needs; (5) public budgets and expenditures to help citizens understand and influence decisions about the allocation of public resources, monitor public spending and hold government actors accountable for their management of public financial resources (6) monitoring and evaluating the accessibility, quality and efficiency of public services and (7) monitoring and overseeing public action and seeking retribution for injustices or misdeeds.