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The severe global shortage of health and care workers poses a dangerous threat to health systems, especially in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). The authors of the article “Prioritising the health and care workforce shortage: protect, invest, together”, including six health ministers and the WHO Director-General, assert that this workforce crisis requires urgent action and propose “protect, invest, together” to tackle it.
Deep protection of the existing workforce, they assert, is needed through improved working conditions, fair compensation, upholding rights, addressing discrimination and violence, closing gender inequities, and implementing the WHO Global Health and Care Worker Compact to ensure dignified working environments. All countries must prioritize retaining workers to build resilient health systems.
Significantly increased and strategic long-term investments are imperative in both training new health workers through educational channels and sustaining their employment. Countries should designate workforce development, especially at the primary care level, as crucial human capital investments impacting population health outcomes. Intersectoral financing is key, bringing together domestic funds, grants, concessional sources, and private sector partners into coordinated national plans. Global solidarity is required to resource-constrained LMIC health workforces.
Intersectoral collaboration between ministries of health, finance, economic development, education and employment can develop integrated health workforce strategies. South-South partnerships offer pathways for health worker training and mobility to address regional shortages. Small island nations confront severe but overlooked workforce obstacles requiring specially tailored policy approaches.
The severe projected health workforce shortfall urgently necessitates that actors globally protect existing health workers, strategically invest in growing national workforces, and unite intersectorally behind robust health employment systems, especially in lower resourced contexts. As the authors emphasize, “there can be no health, health systems, or emergency response without the health and care workforce.”
What about the role of education?
This article does not provide much direct discussion of health education systems related to the global health workforce shortage. However, it makes the following relevant points:
- Chronic underinvestment in the health and care workforce, including in education and training, has contributed to long-standing shortages.
- There is a need for strategic investments in health and care worker education and lifelong learning, with a focus on primary health care, to help address shortages.
- Investments in standalone health infrastructure will have little effect unless matched by investments in developing the health workforce through education and training.
- Increasing, smarter and sustained long-term financing is crucial for health and care worker education and employment.
- Regional and subregional collaboration should be explored to bring together resources and capacities for health workforce education and training.
- Intersectoral collaboration between health, education, finance and other sectors is important for developing policies and making investments in health workforce education.
Read more to understand what this means for health education: Protect, invest, together: strengthening health workforce through new learning models
Reference: Agyeman-Manu et al. Prioritising the health and care workforce shortage: protect, invest, together. The Lancet Global Health (2023). https://doi.org/10.1016/S2214-109X(23)00224-3
Illustration: The Geneva Learning Foundation Collection © 2024
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The severe global shortage of health and care workers poses a dangerous threat to health systems, especially in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). The authors of the article “Prioritising the health and care workforce shortage: protect, invest, together”, including six health ministers and the WHO Director-General, assert that this workforce crisis requires urgent action and propose “protect, invest, together” to tackle it.
Deep protection of the existing workforce, they assert, is needed through improved working conditions, fair compensation, upholding rights, addressing discrimination and violence, closing gender inequities, and implementing the WHO Global Health and Care Worker Compact to ensure dignified working environments. All countries must prioritize retaining workers to build resilient health systems.
Significantly increased and strategic long-term investments are imperative in both training new health workers through educational channels and sustaining their employment. Countries should designate workforce development, especially at the primary care level, as crucial human capital investments impacting population health outcomes. Intersectoral financing is key, bringing together domestic funds, grants, concessional sources, and private sector partners into coordinated national plans. Global solidarity is required to resource-constrained LMIC health workforces.
Intersectoral collaboration between ministries of health, finance, economic development, education and employment can develop integrated health workforce strategies. South-South partnerships offer pathways for health worker training and mobility to address regional shortages. Small island nations confront severe but overlooked workforce obstacles requiring specially tailored policy approaches.
The severe projected health workforce shortfall urgently necessitates that actors globally protect existing health workers, strategically invest in growing national workforces, and unite intersectorally behind robust health employment systems, especially in lower resourced contexts. As the authors emphasize, “there can be no health, health systems, or emergency response without the health and care workforce.”
What about the role of education?
This article does not provide much direct discussion of health education systems related to the global health workforce shortage. However, it makes the following relevant points:
- Chronic underinvestment in the health and care workforce, including in education and training, has contributed to long-standing shortages.
- There is a need for strategic investments in health and care worker education and lifelong learning, with a focus on primary health care, to help address shortages.
- Investments in standalone health infrastructure will have little effect unless matched by investments in developing the health workforce through education and training.
- Increasing, smarter and sustained long-term financing is crucial for health and care worker education and employment.
- Regional and subregional collaboration should be explored to bring together resources and capacities for health workforce education and training.
- Intersectoral collaboration between health, education, finance and other sectors is important for developing policies and making investments in health workforce education.
Read more to understand what this means for health education: Protect, invest, together: strengthening health workforce through new learning models
Reference: Agyeman-Manu et al. Prioritising the health and care workforce shortage: protect, invest, together. The Lancet Global Health (2023). https://doi.org/10.1016/S2214-109X(23)00224-3
Illustration: The Geneva Learning Foundation Collection © 2024
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The Geneva Learning Foundation is pleased to announce the tenth edition of Teach to Reach, to be held 20-21 June 2024.
Teach to Reach is a massive, open peer learning event where health professionals network, and learn with colleagues from all over the world. Request your invitation…
Teach to Reach 10 continues a tradition of groundbreaking peer learning started in 2020, when over 3,000 health workers from 80 countries came together to improve immunization training.
17,662 health professionals – over 80% from districts and facilities, half working for government – participated in Teach to Reach 9 in October 2023. Participants shared 940 experiences ahead of the event. See what we learned at Teach to Reach 9 or view Insights Live with Dr Orin Levine.
Teach to Reach is a platform, community, and network to amplify voices from lower-resource settings bearing the greatest burden of disease.
Teach to Reach 10 will focus on the impacts of climate change on health, following the publication of a ground-breaking report sharing insights of over 1,200 health workers.
In the video below, learn from the experiences of 4,700 participants in our Special Event: From community to planet: Health professionals on the frontlines of climate change.
Poor connectivity? You will find the videos on this page in the low-bandwidth, audio-only Teach to Reach podcast on Apple, Spotify, Google, or Amazon Podcasts.
Alongside this theme, other critical health challenges selected by participants for this tenth edition include immunization, neglected tropical diseases (NTDs), and neglected needs of women’s health.
In this video of a Teach to Reach session, learn about local action led by community-based health workers to tackle Female Genital Schistosomiasis (FGS), a neglected tropical disease that affects an estimated 56 million women and girls.
In the run-up to Teach to Reach 10, participants will share their real-world experience. Every success, lessons learned, and challenge will be shared back with the community and brought to the attention of partners.
The Manifesto for investment in health workers, a visionary statement elaborated by over 1,300 health workers, will be launched at Teach to Reach 10.
A diverse range of over 50 global organizations have partnered with Teach to Reach since 2020, including Gavi the Vaccine Alliance, the Wellcome Trust, and UNICEF.
The next video is a session with UNICEF on reaching zero-dose children in urban settings.
Alongside global partners and ministries of health, local community-based organizations will also be invited to become Teach to Reach partners.
Partners are invited to join the first Partner Briefing on Monday 4 March 2024, bringing together global health organizations with a commitment to listening and learning from health workers and the communities they serve.
Illustration: The Geneva Learning Foundation © 2024
#climateChangeAndHealth #ManifestoForGlobalHealth #peerLearning #TeachToReach
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English version | Version française
GENEVA, Switzerland, 8 March 2024 – The Geneva Learning Foundation (TGLF) is sharing a collection of stories titled “Women inspiring women”, shared by 177 women on the frontlines of health and humanitarian action.
Download: The Geneva Learning Foundation. (2024). Women inspiring women: International Women’s Day 2024 (1.0). https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10783218
The collection is a vibrant tapestry of women’s voices from the frontlines of health and humanitarian action, woven together to showcase the resilience, passion, and leadership of women who are making a difference in the face of war, disease, and climate change.
TGLF reached out to women in its global network of more than 60,000 health workers, inviting them to share their heartfelt advice and vision for the future with young women and girls.
Health workers in this network, men and women, are on the frontlines of adversity: they work in remote rural areas or with the urban poor. Many support the needs of nomadic and migrant populations, refugees, and internally-displaced populations (IDPs).
Imagine being able to sit down with a community health worker in Nigeria, a nurse in India, or a doctor in Brazil, and listen to their stories of triumph and struggle. “Women Inspiring Women” makes that possible, bringing together voices that are rarely heard on the global stage.
The responses are raw, honest, and deeply moving.
From remote villages to urban slums, women work to build a better future for their communities.
What makes this collection truly unique is its authenticity and diversity.
“In a world of war, disease, and a worsening climate, literacy is vital for the next generation of women and girls to make better choices concerning health, marriage, and income. Literacy is key in transforming households out of poverty, no matter who they are or where they are born.” – Hauwa Abbas, Public health specialist (MPH), Nigeria
Through their words, these women offer invaluable guidance to the next generation of female leaders. They share the lessons they’ve learned, the challenges they’ve faced, and the hopes they hold for a world where every girl can live a healthy, fulfilling life, no matter where she is born.
“Serving humanity as a health or humanitarian worker is one of the most rewarding careers one can engage in. Though it requires a lot of hard work more importantly and what is usually not thought about is the heart work it involves. The ability to empathize with the sick and those in humanitarian needs is a key ingredient for success.” – Ngozi Kennedy MB ChB, MPH, Public health specialist, Ethiopia
“This collection is a celebration of the incredible resilience and leadership of women health workers and humanitarians worldwide,” said TGLF Executive Director Reda Sadki. “It’s a testament to the power of storytelling to inspire change and unite us in our shared vision for a better future.”
“Insist on making generational impact as a woman against ALL odds! Don’t give up, don’t give in, don’t give way! Persistence wears out resistance! This is my success story today as I battled many challenges to establish rotavirus surveillance in my country as well as rotavirus vaccine introduction advocacy which has finally culminated in the vaccine introduction in Nigeria.” – Professor Beckie Tagbo, Doctor, Institute of Child Health, University of Nigeria Teaching Hospital, Enugu, Nigeria
In the lead up to International Women’s Day, TGLF has been sharing sneak peeks of the stories and quotes on its social media platforms. Follow along on LinkedIn, Twitter/X, Facebook, Instagram and Telegram to get a glimpse of the inspiration that awaits.
“Women Inspiring Women” is more than just a collection of stories. It’s a rallying cry for gender equality, a celebration of women’s leadership, and a reminder of the incredible impact one voice can have. Get ready to be inspired, moved, and empowered by the voices of women health workers and humanitarians worldwide.
Join us in amplifying the voices of these extraordinary women and creating a world where every girl can thrive.
“Resilience and determination in the face of difficulties will be essential – it is vital not to be deterred or discouraged when faced with setbacks of adversity, which are an inevitability in these spheres. Health or humanitarian work is all about people. There may be days where you question your decision and that is where determination keeps you going.” – Genise Pascal-Ferrer Iglesias, Coordinator of Imaging Services, Goodwill, Dominica
“Empowered women empower women. Ever since you were born, I kept you with me in all my philanthropic activities. […] I wish you all the blessings, happiness and success in life. Someday, you will write a similar letter to your own daughter saying, ‘Empowered women empower women’.” – Dr Faiza Rabbani, Public health specialist (MPH), Lahore District, Punjab Province, Pakistan
Download “Women inspiring women” via this link https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10783218
About the Geneva Learning Foundation
Learn more about The Geneva Learning Foundation: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7316466
Created by a group of learning innovators and scientists with the mission to discover new ways to lead change, TGLF’s team combines over 70 years of experience with both country-based (field) work and country, region, and global partners.
- Our small, fully remote agile team already supports over 60,000 health practitioners leading change in 137 countries.
- We reach the front lines: 21% face armed conflict; 25% work with refugees or internally-displaced populations; 62% work in remote rural areas; 47% with the urban poor; 36% support the needs of nomadic/migrant populations.
TGLF’s unique package:
- Helps local actors take action with communities to tackle local challenges, and
- provides the tools to build a global network, platform, and community of health workers that can scale up local impact for global health.
In 2019, research showed that TGLF’s approach can accelerate locally-led implementation of innovative strategies by 7X, and works especially well in fragile contexts.
Photo: The Geneva Learning Foundation Collection © 2024
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https://redasadki.me/2024/03/07/womens-voices-from-the-frontlines-of-health-and-humanitarian-action/
#gender #globalHealth #healthWorkers #HRH #InternationalWomenSDay #IWD2024 #WomenInspiringWomen
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English version | Version française
GENÈVE, Suisse, le 8 mars 2024 — La Fondation Apprendre Genève (TGLF) partage une collection de récits intitulée « Des femmes pour la santé », partagées par 177 femmes en première ligne de la santé et de l’action humanitaire.
Télécharger la collection: La Fondation Apprendre Genève (2024). Des femmes pour la santé : Journée internationale de la femme 2024 (1.0). https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10792027
La collection réunit des voix de femmes provenant des premières lignes de la santé et de l’action humanitaire. Ensemble, elles mettent en valeur la résilience, la passion et le leadership des femmes qui font la différence face à la guerre, à la maladie et au changement climatique.
La Fondation a lancé l’appel aux femmes de son réseau international de plus de 60 000 professionnels de la santé, les invitant à partager avec les jeunes femmes et les filles leurs conseils sincères et leur vision de l’avenir.
Les membres de ce réseau, hommes et femmes, sont en première ligne face à l’adversité : ils travaillent dans des zones rurales isolées ou auprès des populations urbaines pauvres. Nombre d’entre eux répondent aux besoins des populations nomades et migrantes, des réfugiés et des personnes déplacées à l’intérieur de leur propre pays.
Imaginez que vous puissiez partager un moment avec un agent de santé communautaire au Nigéria, une infirmière en Inde ou un médecin au Brésil, et écouter leurs histoires de triomphe et de lutte. C’est ce que permet « Des femmes pour la santé ».
Les réponses sont sincères et profondément émouvantes.
Des villages reculés aux bidonvilles urbains, les femmes s’efforcent de construire un avenir meilleur pour leurs communautés.
Ce qui rend cette collection vraiment unique, c’est son authenticité et sa diversité.
« Dans un monde marqué par la guerre, la maladie et la détérioration du climat, l’alphabétisation est vitale pour que la prochaine génération de femmes et de jeunes filles puisse faire de meilleurs choix en matière de santé, de mariage et de revenus. L’alphabétisation est essentielle pour sortir les ménages de la pauvreté, quels qu’ils soient et où qu’ils soient nés.» — Hauwa Abbas, spécialiste en santé publique, Nigéria.
Par leurs paroles, ces femmes offrent des conseils inestimables à la prochaine génération de dirigeantes. Elles partagent les leçons qu’elles ont apprises, les défis auxquels elles ont été confrontées et les espoirs qu’elles nourrissent pour un monde où chaque fille peut vivre une vie saine et épanouie, quel que soit son lieu de naissance.
«Servir l’humanité en tant que travailleur sanitaire ou humanitaire est l’une des carrières les plus gratifiantes qui soient. Bien qu’elle exige beaucoup de travail, le plus important, et ce à quoi on ne pense généralement pas, c’est le travail du cœur qu’elle implique. La capacité d’empathie avec les malades et les personnes ayant des besoins humanitaires est un ingrédient clé de la réussite ». — Ngozi Kennedy MB ChB, MPH, spécialiste de la santé publique, Éthiopie
« Cette collection est une célébration de l’incroyable résilience et du leadership des travailleuses de la santé et des humanitaires du monde entier », a déclaré Reda Sadki, directeur exécutif de la Fondation. « Elle témoigne du pouvoir de la narration pour inspirer le changement et nous unir dans notre vision commune d’un avenir meilleur.»
«Insistez pour avoir un impact générationnel en tant que femme contre TOUTE attente ! N’abandonnez pas, ne cédez pas, ne cédez pas ! La persévérance a raison de la résistance ! C’est ma réussite aujourd’hui, car j’ai relevé de nombreux défis pour mettre en place une surveillance du rotavirus dans mon pays ainsi qu’un plaidoyer pour l’introduction du vaccin contre le rotavirus, qui a finalement abouti à l’introduction du vaccin au Nigéria.» — Professeur Beckie Tagbo, médecin, Institut de la santé infantile, hôpital universitaire de l’université du Nigéria, Enugu, Nigéria.
À l’approche de la Journée internationale de la femme, la Fondation a partagé des aperçus des histoires et des citations sur ses plateformes de médias sociaux. Suivez-les sur LinkedIn, Twitter/X, Facebook, Instagram et Telegram pour avoir un aperçu de l’inspiration qui vous attend.
«Les femmes inspirent les femmes » est plus qu’une simple collection d’histoires. C’est un cri de ralliement pour l’égalité des sexes, une célébration du leadership des femmes et un rappel de l’impact incroyable qu’une seule voix peut avoir. Préparez-vous à être inspirés, émus et responsabilisés par les voix des travailleuses de la santé et des humanitaires du monde entier.
Rejoignez-nous pour amplifier les voix de ces femmes extraordinaires et créer un monde où chaque fille peut s’épanouir.
« La résilience et la détermination face aux difficultés seront essentielles — il est vital de ne pas se laisser dissuader ou décourager face aux revers de l’adversité, qui sont une inévitabilité dans ces sphères. Le travail dans le domaine de la santé ou de l’humanitaire est avant tout une affaire de personnes. Il peut y avoir des jours où vous remettez votre décision en question et c’est là que la détermination vous permet de continuer.» — Genise Pascal-Ferrer Iglesias, coordinatrice des services d’imagerie, Goodwill, Dominique
«Les femmes autonomes donnent du pouvoir aux femmes. Depuis votre naissance, je vous ai accompagnée dans toutes mes activités philanthropiques. […] Je vous souhaite toutes les bénédictions, le bonheur et le succès dans la vie. Un jour, vous écrirez une lettre similaire à votre propre fille en lui disant : “Les femmes autonomes autonomisent les femmes.» — Dr Faiza Rabbani, spécialiste de la santé publique (MPH), district de Lahore, province du Pendjab, Pakistan
Téléchargez « Des femmes pour la santé » via ce lien https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10783218
A propos de la Fondation Apprendre Genève
Pour en savoir plus sur La Fondation Apprendre Genève : https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7316466
- Créée par un groupe d’innovateurs et de scientifiques de l’apprentissage ayant pour mission de découvrir de nouvelles façons de conduire le changement, l’équipe de la Fondation combine plus de 70 ans d’expérience à la fois avec un travail basé dans le pays (sur le terrain) et avec des partenaires nationaux, régionaux et internationaux.
- Notre petite équipe agile, entièrement à distance, soutient déjà plus de 60 000 professionnels de la santé qui conduisent le changement dans 137 pays.
- Nous sommes en première ligne : 21 % sont confrontés à des conflits armés ; 25 % travaillent avec des réfugiés ou des populations déplacées à l’intérieur du pays ; 62 % travaillent dans des zones rurales éloignées ; 47 % avec les pauvres des villes ; 36 % soutiennent les besoins des populations nomades/migrantes.
Le modèle innovant de la Fondation :
- aide les acteurs locaux à agir avec les communautés pour relever les défis locaux, et
- fournit les outils pour construire un réseau mondial, une plateforme et une communauté d’agents de santé qui peuvent augmenter l’impact local pour la santé internationale.
En 2019, la recherche a montré que l’approche de la Fondation peut accélérer de 7X la mise en œuvre de stratégies innovantes menées localement, et fonctionne particulièrement bien dans les contextes fragiles.
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#francophone #gender #globalHealth #HRH #InternationalWomenSDay #IWD2024 #JournéeInternationaleDesFemmes #WomenInspiringWomen
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Samuel Chukwuemeka Obasi, a health professional from Nigeria:
“Going back home to the community where I grew up as a child, I was shocked to see that most of the rivers we used to swim and fish in have all dried up, and those that are still there have become very shallow so that you can easily walk through a river you required a boat to cross in years past.”
In July 2023, more than 1200 health workers from 68 countries shared their experiences of changes in climate and health, at a unique event designed to shed light on the realities of climate impacts on the health of the communities they serve.
Before, during and after COP28, we are sharing health workers’ observations and insights.
Follow The Geneva Learning Foundation to learn how climate change is affecting health in multiple ways:
- How extreme weather events can lead to tragic loss of life.
- How changing weather patterns are leading to crop failures and malnutrition, and forcing people to abandon their homes.
- How infectious diseases are surging as mosquitoes proliferate and water sources are contaminated.
- How climate stresses are particularly problematic for those with existing health conditions, like cardiovascular disease and diabetes.
- How climate impacts are having a devastating effect on mental health as people’s ways of life are destroyed.
- How climate change is changing the very fabric of society, driving displacement and social hardship that undermines health and wellbeing.
- How a volatile climate is disrupting the delivery of essential health services and people’s ability to access them.
- We will finish the series with inspiring stories of how health workers are already responding to such challenges, working with communities to counter the effects of a changing climate.
On 1 December 2023, TGLF will be publishing a compendium and analysis of these 1200 contributions – On the frontline of climate change and health: A health worker eyewitness report. Get the report…
This landmark report – a global first – kickstarts our campaign to ensure that health workers in the Global South are recognized as:
- The people already having to manage the impacts of climate change on health.
- An essential voice to listen to in order to understand climate impacts on health.
- A potentially critical group to work with to protect the health of communities in the face of a changing climate.
Before, during, and after COP28, we are advocating for the recognition and support of health workers as trusted advisers to communities bearing the brunt of climate change effects on health.
#climate #climateChange #communities #COP28 #health #healthWorkers #HRH #leadership
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Samuel Chukwuemeka Obasi, a health professional from Nigeria:
“Going back home to the community where I grew up as a child, I was shocked to see that most of the rivers we used to swim and fish in have all dried up, and those that are still there have become very shallow so that you can easily walk through a river you required a boat to cross in years past.”
In July 2023, more than 1200 health workers from 68 countries shared their experiences of changes in climate and health, at a unique event designed to shed light on the realities of climate impacts on the health of the communities they serve.
Before, during and after COP28, we are sharing health workers’ observations and insights.
Follow The Geneva Learning Foundation to learn how climate change is affecting health in multiple ways:
- How extreme weather events can lead to tragic loss of life.
- How changing weather patterns are leading to crop failures and malnutrition, and forcing people to abandon their homes.
- How infectious diseases are surging as mosquitoes proliferate and water sources are contaminated.
- How climate stresses are particularly problematic for those with existing health conditions, like cardiovascular disease and diabetes.
- How climate impacts are having a devastating effect on mental health as people’s ways of life are destroyed.
- How climate change is changing the very fabric of society, driving displacement and social hardship that undermines health and wellbeing.
- How a volatile climate is disrupting the delivery of essential health services and people’s ability to access them.
- We will finish the series with inspiring stories of how health workers are already responding to such challenges, working with communities to counter the effects of a changing climate.
On 1 December 2023, TGLF will be publishing a compendium and analysis of these 1200 contributions – On the frontline of climate change and health: A health worker eyewitness report. Get the report…
This landmark report – a global first – kickstarts our campaign to ensure that health workers in the Global South are recognized as:
- The people already having to manage the impacts of climate change on health.
- An essential voice to listen to in order to understand climate impacts on health.
- A potentially critical group to work with to protect the health of communities in the face of a changing climate.
Before, during, and after COP28, we are advocating for the recognition and support of health workers as trusted advisers to communities bearing the brunt of climate change effects on health.
#climate #climateChange #communities #COP28 #health #healthWorkers #HRH #leadership
-
Samuel Chukwuemeka Obasi, a health professional from Nigeria:
“Going back home to the community where I grew up as a child, I was shocked to see that most of the rivers we used to swim and fish in have all dried up, and those that are still there have become very shallow so that you can easily walk through a river you required a boat to cross in years past.”
In July 2023, more than 1200 health workers from 68 countries shared their experiences of changes in climate and health, at a unique event designed to shed light on the realities of climate impacts on the health of the communities they serve.
Before, during and after COP28, we are sharing health workers’ observations and insights.
Follow The Geneva Learning Foundation to learn how climate change is affecting health in multiple ways:
- How extreme weather events can lead to tragic loss of life.
- How changing weather patterns are leading to crop failures and malnutrition, and forcing people to abandon their homes.
- How infectious diseases are surging as mosquitoes proliferate and water sources are contaminated.
- How climate stresses are particularly problematic for those with existing health conditions, like cardiovascular disease and diabetes.
- How climate impacts are having a devastating effect on mental health as people’s ways of life are destroyed.
- How climate change is changing the very fabric of society, driving displacement and social hardship that undermines health and wellbeing.
- How a volatile climate is disrupting the delivery of essential health services and people’s ability to access them.
- We will finish the series with inspiring stories of how health workers are already responding to such challenges, working with communities to counter the effects of a changing climate.
On 1 December 2023, TGLF will be publishing a compendium and analysis of these 1200 contributions – On the frontline of climate change and health: A health worker eyewitness report. Get the report…
This landmark report – a global first – kickstarts our campaign to ensure that health workers in the Global South are recognized as:
- The people already having to manage the impacts of climate change on health.
- An essential voice to listen to in order to understand climate impacts on health.
- A potentially critical group to work with to protect the health of communities in the face of a changing climate.
Before, during, and after COP28, we are advocating for the recognition and support of health workers as trusted advisers to communities bearing the brunt of climate change effects on health.
#climate #climateChange #communities #COP28 #health #healthWorkers #HRH #leadership
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The Geneva Learning Foundation (TGLF) has created a platform enabling health workers to describe the impacts of climate change on their local communities. Here are ten of the most striking reports.
Published on 30 November 2023 on the Gavi #VaccinesWork blog
In July 2023, more than 1,200 health workers from 68 countries shared their experiences of changes in climate and health at a unique Geneva Learning Foundation event designed to shed light on the realities of climate impacts on the health of the communities they serve.
A special TGLF report – On the frontline of climate change and health: A health worker eyewitness report – includes a compendium and analysis of these 1,200 health workers’ observations and insights. Here are ten of the most striking.
Samuel Chukwuemeka Obasi, who works for the Ministry of Health in Abuja, Nigeria, has noticed big changes to the environment.
“Going back home to the community where I grew up as a child, I was shocked to see that most of the rivers we used to swim and fish in have all dried up, and those that are still there have become very shallow, so that you can easily walk through a river you required a boat to cross in years past.”
Iruoma Chinedu Ofortube, who works at the district level in Lagos State, Nigeria, recounts two stories that illustrate the lethal impact of extreme weather.
“A family embarked on a journey without potentially expecting any danger. Sadly, on their way, heavy rainfall started. The family was oblivious to the reality that the rain started ahead of them while they were en route to their destination. Unfortunately, they ran into a massive flood near a river. The force and the current from the flood swept their vehicle down the river, and before help could come for them, they drowned helplessly alongside other victims of the same circumstances.
“There was also a pregnant woman in labour. Unfortunately, they couldn’t get a strong boat or canoe that could stand the high current and waves coming from the seaside. In the process of searching for a better means of taking her to the nearest health centre, she got exhausted and died.”
Assoumane Mahamadou Issifou, who works for an NGO in Agadez, Niger, points out how food shortages are leading to malnutrition and anaemia, particularly in women and children.
“During the five years that I served in the health service in the Agadez region, I observed significant changes, particularly in the occurrence of heavy rains, which were uncommon in the past. These heavy rains have led to flooding and the displacement of populations, often forcing them to settle wherever they can. Due to their vulnerability during these challenging times, children and women suffer greatly.
“This situation, especially prevalent among newborns and children under five, contributes to malnutrition. The challenges persist because the Agadez region is situated in a desert area with very low rainfall.
“However, even with minimal rain, the region faces immense difficulties. Nutritional foods are insufficient, and environmental degradation compounds the issue. As a result, the population struggles to access daily sustenance. Pregnant women and children lack foods rich in vitamins, leading to undernourishment and subsequent diseases such as malnutrition and anaemia.
“Historically, Agadez was known for its scarcity of rain. With the recent climate change-induced increase in rainfall, few people have come to accept and understand this phenomenon. The region’s architecture is outdated, and the city has transformed into a migratory hub where diverse behaviours converge. New diseases emerge, and the indigenous population is grappling with illnesses that were previously unknown to them.”
A woman working for the Ministry of Health in the DRC, based in Kinshasa, describes how water level changes are affecting insect proliferation and leading to changing patterns of malaria and other diseases.
“A drought, characterised by a drop in rainfall during recent rainy seasons, has affected the City Province of Kinshasa, particularly in the Makelele District (located in the Bandalungwa commune) where I live.
“This area is bordered by two rivers, Mâkelele 1 and 2. The scarcity of rain in the region during the past rainy seasons has led to a significant reduction in water flow within these two rivers. Consequently, rubbish and debris have accumulated along the riverbanks.
“This situation has resulted in the proliferation of mosquitoes and other unidentified insects. This increase in insect activity has not only led to a rise in malaria cases, but has also given rise to a newly emerging form of dermatosis, the exact nature of which is yet to be determined. It is suspected that these skin lesions develop due to scratching after insect bites. Disturbingly, over 10% of the population within the municipality has been affected by this condition.”
Dieudonne Tanasngar, who works for the Ministry of Health in Chad, explains how displacement contributes to poor sanitation practices, leading to increased spread of water-borne diseases.
“In Lake Chad, during the rainy season, the various arms of the lake expand, causing flooding that affects the villages situated along its shores. This flooding often forces the inhabitants to relocate to higher ground.
“However, a significant portion of the population around the lake lacks proper sanitation facilities, leading to open defecation near the water’s edge. As the water levels rise, this practice contributes to the spread of diseases, particularly when access to health care facilities becomes challenging.
“Access to health care centres is hindered by the need to cross one or two bodies of water before reaching the nearest facility. This geographical challenge adds to the difficulties faced by the affected population. Consequently, a range of diseases can emerge and afflict the community due to these conditions.
“The combination of poor sanitation practices, flooding, and limited access to health care facilities creates a complex situation that requires concerted efforts to improve living conditions, sanitation infrastructure, and health care access for the people living around Lake Chad.”
Coulibaly Seydou, who works for the Ministry of Health in Boussé District, Burkina Faso, has noted how changing dietary habits, alongside declining mental wellbeing, is leading to an increased risk of non-communicable diseases such as high blood pressure and diabetes.
“For several years, the pattern of rainfall has been becoming increasingly irregular. The duration of the rainy season is progressively getting shorter, interspersed with periods of drought. This unpredictability makes it challenging for farmers to adjust their crop choices according to the rainfall pattern, leading to growing concerns. Discussions about the upcoming rainy season can induce anxiety and worry among rural communities.
“When it comes to the impact of climate change on mental health, we can observe a significant disturbance in the well-being of farmers. Even just a couple of days without rainfall can trigger a sense of sadness among them. Instances of minor depression have been noted among household heads who helplessly witness their crops withering due to inadequate moisture.
“In terms of physical health, there has been an uptick in the prevalence of diseases and conditions that can be attributed to changes in dietary habits. Conditions such as hypertension, diabetes and obesity are on the rise. This can be linked to the shift towards consuming industrially processed foods that are low in nutritional value and high in chemical additives.”
A man working for the Ministry of Health in Beni in the DRC describes the tragic case of a family driven into poverty and unable to afford health care for the children.
“As a result of the disruption in the seasonal shifts, a modest family reliant solely on agriculture experienced the tragic death of their young son within their community.
“The critical factors involved were as follows: their crop yield plummeted to zero due to their inability to manage the erratic changes in the seasons, and malnutrition, likely compounded by other illnesses, afflicted the family. Faced with financial constraints stemming from the complete failure of their agricultural efforts, they resorted to providing home-based care for their family.
“Tragically, their youngest son paid the ultimate price with his life. In summary, the ever-changing climate dynamics have left us disoriented and uncertain about the future.”
Fokzia Elijah, who works for the Ministry of Health in the Province of Batha, Chad, highlights how climate change is having multiple health and social impacts, particularly on pastoralists.
“Batha is the first pastoral province, often experiencing prolonged droughts followed by irregular and sometimes excessive rainfall. These climatic variations lead to challenges in cattle herding, house collapses, and difficulties in sustaining pastoralism, which typically lasts only two to three months.
“Pastoralists often migrate southward with women and children following them. Consequently, malnutrition prevails, affecting over 14% of the population, with women and children being the most vulnerable. Women who remain in the villages demonstrate resilience by engaging in limited market gardening and gathering wild oilseeds to produce sweet syrup for porridge.
“A significant issue is the death of animals between March and June due to inadequate pasture and water. This impacts the most vulnerable, particularly women and children. Batha Province, once renowned for its diverse flora and fauna, has seen the disappearance of most animals except for birds. Hyena attacks have become frequent as they search for food in communities, often targeting domestic pets.”
Linda Raji, who works for an NGO in the Kaida and Waru communities in Nigeria, highlights the implication of enviornmental change for young women – one of a range of gender-specific impacts of climate change.
“Prolonged drought dries up the dirty community stream that serves both livestock and residents. This makes it difficult for community members to access water and much harder for menstrual hygiene management for teenage girls leading to an increase in infections in the unbearable heat.
“Due to the difficulty in managing the monthly menstrual cycle due to limited access to water sanitation hygiene and period poverty, many teenage girls prefer to get pregnant to save them the worry of menstruating monthly for nine months.”
Dr Chinedu Anthony Iwu, who works at a health facility in Orlu Local Government Area in Nigeria, describes how working with communities can build resilience to climate change impacts.
“The changing climate has brought about an increase in the prevalence of vector-borne diseases. Mosquitoes are now breeding and transmitting diseases like malaria more intensely. The community lacked proper health care facilities and resources to effectively combat these diseases, leading to a rise in illness and mortality rates. Mothers’ means of livelihood were usually disrupted due to the time and effort spent in caring for their sick children with a significant impact on household welfare.
“Recognising the urgent need to address these climate-related health challenges, we engaged in community-led initiatives that included comprehensive health awareness campaigns to provide education on sanitation and hygiene practices, and education of residents about preventive measures against vector-borne diseases. By engaging our community health extension workers, we were able to organise regular health check-ups in the communities, focusing on early detection and treatment of illnesses.
“Over time, these collective efforts began to yield positive results. The mothers in the communities witnessed improvements in income as they progressively began to spend less time pursuing children’s health care challenges due to the adoption of preventive measures, thereby becoming more resilient to the changing climate.
This experience highlights the challenges faced by rural communities in Nigeria due to climate change. It demonstrates the importance of community engagement, sustainable practices, and support from relevant stakeholders in addressing the climate-health nexus and building resilience in the face of a changing climate.”
Written by Ian Jones for Gavi. Photo credit: Aerial view of a flooded urban residential area of Dera Allah yar city in Jaffarabad District, Baluchistan Province, Pakistan. Credit: Gavi/2022/Asad Zaidi
#climateAndHealth #climateChange #Gavi #immunization #TheGenevaLearningFoundation #VaccinesWork
-
The Geneva Learning Foundation (TGLF) has created a platform enabling health workers to describe the impacts of climate change on their local communities. Here are ten of the most striking reports.
Published on 30 November 2023 on the Gavi #VaccinesWork blog
In July 2023, more than 1,200 health workers from 68 countries shared their experiences of changes in climate and health at a unique Geneva Learning Foundation event designed to shed light on the realities of climate impacts on the health of the communities they serve.
A special TGLF report – On the frontline of climate change and health: A health worker eyewitness report – includes a compendium and analysis of these 1,200 health workers’ observations and insights. Here are ten of the most striking.
Samuel Chukwuemeka Obasi, who works for the Ministry of Health in Abuja, Nigeria, has noticed big changes to the environment.
“Going back home to the community where I grew up as a child, I was shocked to see that most of the rivers we used to swim and fish in have all dried up, and those that are still there have become very shallow, so that you can easily walk through a river you required a boat to cross in years past.”
Iruoma Chinedu Ofortube, who works at the district level in Lagos State, Nigeria, recounts two stories that illustrate the lethal impact of extreme weather.
“A family embarked on a journey without potentially expecting any danger. Sadly, on their way, heavy rainfall started. The family was oblivious to the reality that the rain started ahead of them while they were en route to their destination. Unfortunately, they ran into a massive flood near a river. The force and the current from the flood swept their vehicle down the river, and before help could come for them, they drowned helplessly alongside other victims of the same circumstances.
“There was also a pregnant woman in labour. Unfortunately, they couldn’t get a strong boat or canoe that could stand the high current and waves coming from the seaside. In the process of searching for a better means of taking her to the nearest health centre, she got exhausted and died.”
Assoumane Mahamadou Issifou, who works for an NGO in Agadez, Niger, points out how food shortages are leading to malnutrition and anaemia, particularly in women and children.
“During the five years that I served in the health service in the Agadez region, I observed significant changes, particularly in the occurrence of heavy rains, which were uncommon in the past. These heavy rains have led to flooding and the displacement of populations, often forcing them to settle wherever they can. Due to their vulnerability during these challenging times, children and women suffer greatly.
“This situation, especially prevalent among newborns and children under five, contributes to malnutrition. The challenges persist because the Agadez region is situated in a desert area with very low rainfall.
“However, even with minimal rain, the region faces immense difficulties. Nutritional foods are insufficient, and environmental degradation compounds the issue. As a result, the population struggles to access daily sustenance. Pregnant women and children lack foods rich in vitamins, leading to undernourishment and subsequent diseases such as malnutrition and anaemia.
“Historically, Agadez was known for its scarcity of rain. With the recent climate change-induced increase in rainfall, few people have come to accept and understand this phenomenon. The region’s architecture is outdated, and the city has transformed into a migratory hub where diverse behaviours converge. New diseases emerge, and the indigenous population is grappling with illnesses that were previously unknown to them.”
A woman working for the Ministry of Health in the DRC, based in Kinshasa, describes how water level changes are affecting insect proliferation and leading to changing patterns of malaria and other diseases.
“A drought, characterised by a drop in rainfall during recent rainy seasons, has affected the City Province of Kinshasa, particularly in the Makelele District (located in the Bandalungwa commune) where I live.
“This area is bordered by two rivers, Mâkelele 1 and 2. The scarcity of rain in the region during the past rainy seasons has led to a significant reduction in water flow within these two rivers. Consequently, rubbish and debris have accumulated along the riverbanks.
“This situation has resulted in the proliferation of mosquitoes and other unidentified insects. This increase in insect activity has not only led to a rise in malaria cases, but has also given rise to a newly emerging form of dermatosis, the exact nature of which is yet to be determined. It is suspected that these skin lesions develop due to scratching after insect bites. Disturbingly, over 10% of the population within the municipality has been affected by this condition.”
Dieudonne Tanasngar, who works for the Ministry of Health in Chad, explains how displacement contributes to poor sanitation practices, leading to increased spread of water-borne diseases.
“In Lake Chad, during the rainy season, the various arms of the lake expand, causing flooding that affects the villages situated along its shores. This flooding often forces the inhabitants to relocate to higher ground.
“However, a significant portion of the population around the lake lacks proper sanitation facilities, leading to open defecation near the water’s edge. As the water levels rise, this practice contributes to the spread of diseases, particularly when access to health care facilities becomes challenging.
“Access to health care centres is hindered by the need to cross one or two bodies of water before reaching the nearest facility. This geographical challenge adds to the difficulties faced by the affected population. Consequently, a range of diseases can emerge and afflict the community due to these conditions.
“The combination of poor sanitation practices, flooding, and limited access to health care facilities creates a complex situation that requires concerted efforts to improve living conditions, sanitation infrastructure, and health care access for the people living around Lake Chad.”
Coulibaly Seydou, who works for the Ministry of Health in Boussé District, Burkina Faso, has noted how changing dietary habits, alongside declining mental wellbeing, is leading to an increased risk of non-communicable diseases such as high blood pressure and diabetes.
“For several years, the pattern of rainfall has been becoming increasingly irregular. The duration of the rainy season is progressively getting shorter, interspersed with periods of drought. This unpredictability makes it challenging for farmers to adjust their crop choices according to the rainfall pattern, leading to growing concerns. Discussions about the upcoming rainy season can induce anxiety and worry among rural communities.
“When it comes to the impact of climate change on mental health, we can observe a significant disturbance in the well-being of farmers. Even just a couple of days without rainfall can trigger a sense of sadness among them. Instances of minor depression have been noted among household heads who helplessly witness their crops withering due to inadequate moisture.
“In terms of physical health, there has been an uptick in the prevalence of diseases and conditions that can be attributed to changes in dietary habits. Conditions such as hypertension, diabetes and obesity are on the rise. This can be linked to the shift towards consuming industrially processed foods that are low in nutritional value and high in chemical additives.”
A man working for the Ministry of Health in Beni in the DRC describes the tragic case of a family driven into poverty and unable to afford health care for the children.
“As a result of the disruption in the seasonal shifts, a modest family reliant solely on agriculture experienced the tragic death of their young son within their community.
“The critical factors involved were as follows: their crop yield plummeted to zero due to their inability to manage the erratic changes in the seasons, and malnutrition, likely compounded by other illnesses, afflicted the family. Faced with financial constraints stemming from the complete failure of their agricultural efforts, they resorted to providing home-based care for their family.
“Tragically, their youngest son paid the ultimate price with his life. In summary, the ever-changing climate dynamics have left us disoriented and uncertain about the future.”
Fokzia Elijah, who works for the Ministry of Health in the Province of Batha, Chad, highlights how climate change is having multiple health and social impacts, particularly on pastoralists.
“Batha is the first pastoral province, often experiencing prolonged droughts followed by irregular and sometimes excessive rainfall. These climatic variations lead to challenges in cattle herding, house collapses, and difficulties in sustaining pastoralism, which typically lasts only two to three months.
“Pastoralists often migrate southward with women and children following them. Consequently, malnutrition prevails, affecting over 14% of the population, with women and children being the most vulnerable. Women who remain in the villages demonstrate resilience by engaging in limited market gardening and gathering wild oilseeds to produce sweet syrup for porridge.
“A significant issue is the death of animals between March and June due to inadequate pasture and water. This impacts the most vulnerable, particularly women and children. Batha Province, once renowned for its diverse flora and fauna, has seen the disappearance of most animals except for birds. Hyena attacks have become frequent as they search for food in communities, often targeting domestic pets.”
Linda Raji, who works for an NGO in the Kaida and Waru communities in Nigeria, highlights the implication of enviornmental change for young women – one of a range of gender-specific impacts of climate change.
“Prolonged drought dries up the dirty community stream that serves both livestock and residents. This makes it difficult for community members to access water and much harder for menstrual hygiene management for teenage girls leading to an increase in infections in the unbearable heat.
“Due to the difficulty in managing the monthly menstrual cycle due to limited access to water sanitation hygiene and period poverty, many teenage girls prefer to get pregnant to save them the worry of menstruating monthly for nine months.”
Dr Chinedu Anthony Iwu, who works at a health facility in Orlu Local Government Area in Nigeria, describes how working with communities can build resilience to climate change impacts.
“The changing climate has brought about an increase in the prevalence of vector-borne diseases. Mosquitoes are now breeding and transmitting diseases like malaria more intensely. The community lacked proper health care facilities and resources to effectively combat these diseases, leading to a rise in illness and mortality rates. Mothers’ means of livelihood were usually disrupted due to the time and effort spent in caring for their sick children with a significant impact on household welfare.
“Recognising the urgent need to address these climate-related health challenges, we engaged in community-led initiatives that included comprehensive health awareness campaigns to provide education on sanitation and hygiene practices, and education of residents about preventive measures against vector-borne diseases. By engaging our community health extension workers, we were able to organise regular health check-ups in the communities, focusing on early detection and treatment of illnesses.
“Over time, these collective efforts began to yield positive results. The mothers in the communities witnessed improvements in income as they progressively began to spend less time pursuing children’s health care challenges due to the adoption of preventive measures, thereby becoming more resilient to the changing climate.
This experience highlights the challenges faced by rural communities in Nigeria due to climate change. It demonstrates the importance of community engagement, sustainable practices, and support from relevant stakeholders in addressing the climate-health nexus and building resilience in the face of a changing climate.”
Written by Ian Jones for Gavi. Photo credit: Aerial view of a flooded urban residential area of Dera Allah yar city in Jaffarabad District, Baluchistan Province, Pakistan. Credit: Gavi/2022/Asad Zaidi
#climateAndHealth #climateChange #Gavi #immunization #TheGenevaLearningFoundation #VaccinesWork
-
The Geneva Learning Foundation (TGLF) has created a platform enabling health workers to describe the impacts of climate change on their local communities. Here are ten of the most striking reports.
Published on 30 November 2023 on the Gavi #VaccinesWork blog. Written by Ian Jones for Gavi.
In July 2023, more than 1,200 health workers from 68 countries shared their experiences of changes in climate and health at a unique Geneva Learning Foundation event designed to shed light on the realities of climate impacts on the health of the communities they serve.
A special TGLF report – On the frontline of climate change and health: A health worker eyewitness report – includes a compendium and analysis of these 1,200 health workers’ observations and insights. Here are ten of the most striking.
Samuel Chukwuemeka Obasi, who works for the Ministry of Health in Abuja, Nigeria, has noticed big changes to the environment.
“Going back home to the community where I grew up as a child, I was shocked to see that most of the rivers we used to swim and fish in have all dried up, and those that are still there have become very shallow, so that you can easily walk through a river you required a boat to cross in years past.”
Iruoma Chinedu Ofortube, who works at the district level in Lagos State, Nigeria, recounts two stories that illustrate the lethal impact of extreme weather.
“A family embarked on a journey without potentially expecting any danger. Sadly, on their way, heavy rainfall started. The family was oblivious to the reality that the rain started ahead of them while they were en route to their destination. Unfortunately, they ran into a massive flood near a river. The force and the current from the flood swept their vehicle down the river, and before help could come for them, they drowned helplessly alongside other victims of the same circumstances.
“There was also a pregnant woman in labour. Unfortunately, they couldn’t get a strong boat or canoe that could stand the high current and waves coming from the seaside. In the process of searching for a better means of taking her to the nearest health centre, she got exhausted and died.”
Assoumane Mahamadou Issifou, who works for an NGO in Agadez, Niger, points out how food shortages are leading to malnutrition and anaemia, particularly in women and children.
“During the five years that I served in the health service in the Agadez region, I observed significant changes, particularly in the occurrence of heavy rains, which were uncommon in the past. These heavy rains have led to flooding and the displacement of populations, often forcing them to settle wherever they can. Due to their vulnerability during these challenging times, children and women suffer greatly.
“This situation, especially prevalent among newborns and children under five, contributes to malnutrition. The challenges persist because the Agadez region is situated in a desert area with very low rainfall.
“However, even with minimal rain, the region faces immense difficulties. Nutritional foods are insufficient, and environmental degradation compounds the issue. As a result, the population struggles to access daily sustenance. Pregnant women and children lack foods rich in vitamins, leading to undernourishment and subsequent diseases such as malnutrition and anaemia.
“Historically, Agadez was known for its scarcity of rain. With the recent climate change-induced increase in rainfall, few people have come to accept and understand this phenomenon. The region’s architecture is outdated, and the city has transformed into a migratory hub where diverse behaviours converge. New diseases emerge, and the indigenous population is grappling with illnesses that were previously unknown to them.”
A woman working for the Ministry of Health in the DRC, based in Kinshasa, describes how water level changes are affecting insect proliferation and leading to changing patterns of malaria and other diseases.
“A drought, characterised by a drop in rainfall during recent rainy seasons, has affected the City Province of Kinshasa, particularly in the Makelele District (located in the Bandalungwa commune) where I live.
“This area is bordered by two rivers, Mâkelele 1 and 2. The scarcity of rain in the region during the past rainy seasons has led to a significant reduction in water flow within these two rivers. Consequently, rubbish and debris have accumulated along the riverbanks.
“This situation has resulted in the proliferation of mosquitoes and other unidentified insects. This increase in insect activity has not only led to a rise in malaria cases, but has also given rise to a newly emerging form of dermatosis, the exact nature of which is yet to be determined. It is suspected that these skin lesions develop due to scratching after insect bites. Disturbingly, over 10% of the population within the municipality has been affected by this condition.”
Dieudonne Tanasngar, who works for the Ministry of Health in Chad, explains how displacement contributes to poor sanitation practices, leading to increased spread of water-borne diseases.
“In Lake Chad, during the rainy season, the various arms of the lake expand, causing flooding that affects the villages situated along its shores. This flooding often forces the inhabitants to relocate to higher ground.
“However, a significant portion of the population around the lake lacks proper sanitation facilities, leading to open defecation near the water’s edge. As the water levels rise, this practice contributes to the spread of diseases, particularly when access to health care facilities becomes challenging.
“Access to health care centres is hindered by the need to cross one or two bodies of water before reaching the nearest facility. This geographical challenge adds to the difficulties faced by the affected population. Consequently, a range of diseases can emerge and afflict the community due to these conditions.
“The combination of poor sanitation practices, flooding, and limited access to health care facilities creates a complex situation that requires concerted efforts to improve living conditions, sanitation infrastructure, and health care access for the people living around Lake Chad.”
Coulibaly Seydou, who works for the Ministry of Health in Boussé District, Burkina Faso, has noted how changing dietary habits, alongside declining mental wellbeing, is leading to an increased risk of non-communicable diseases such as high blood pressure and diabetes.
“For several years, the pattern of rainfall has been becoming increasingly irregular. The duration of the rainy season is progressively getting shorter, interspersed with periods of drought. This unpredictability makes it challenging for farmers to adjust their crop choices according to the rainfall pattern, leading to growing concerns. Discussions about the upcoming rainy season can induce anxiety and worry among rural communities.
“When it comes to the impact of climate change on mental health, we can observe a significant disturbance in the well-being of farmers. Even just a couple of days without rainfall can trigger a sense of sadness among them. Instances of minor depression have been noted among household heads who helplessly witness their crops withering due to inadequate moisture.
“In terms of physical health, there has been an uptick in the prevalence of diseases and conditions that can be attributed to changes in dietary habits. Conditions such as hypertension, diabetes and obesity are on the rise. This can be linked to the shift towards consuming industrially processed foods that are low in nutritional value and high in chemical additives.”
A man working for the Ministry of Health in Beni in the DRC describes the tragic case of a family driven into poverty and unable to afford health care for the children.
“As a result of the disruption in the seasonal shifts, a modest family reliant solely on agriculture experienced the tragic death of their young son within their community.
“The critical factors involved were as follows: their crop yield plummeted to zero due to their inability to manage the erratic changes in the seasons, and malnutrition, likely compounded by other illnesses, afflicted the family. Faced with financial constraints stemming from the complete failure of their agricultural efforts, they resorted to providing home-based care for their family.
“Tragically, their youngest son paid the ultimate price with his life. In summary, the ever-changing climate dynamics have left us disoriented and uncertain about the future.”
Fokzia Elijah, who works for the Ministry of Health in the Province of Batha, Chad, highlights how climate change is having multiple health and social impacts, particularly on pastoralists.
“Batha is the first pastoral province, often experiencing prolonged droughts followed by irregular and sometimes excessive rainfall. These climatic variations lead to challenges in cattle herding, house collapses, and difficulties in sustaining pastoralism, which typically lasts only two to three months.
“Pastoralists often migrate southward with women and children following them. Consequently, malnutrition prevails, affecting over 14% of the population, with women and children being the most vulnerable. Women who remain in the villages demonstrate resilience by engaging in limited market gardening and gathering wild oilseeds to produce sweet syrup for porridge.
“A significant issue is the death of animals between March and June due to inadequate pasture and water. This impacts the most vulnerable, particularly women and children. Batha Province, once renowned for its diverse flora and fauna, has seen the disappearance of most animals except for birds. Hyena attacks have become frequent as they search for food in communities, often targeting domestic pets.”
Linda Raji, who works for an NGO in the Kaida and Waru communities in Nigeria, highlights the implication of enviornmental change for young women – one of a range of gender-specific impacts of climate change.
“Prolonged drought dries up the dirty community stream that serves both livestock and residents. This makes it difficult for community members to access water and much harder for menstrual hygiene management for teenage girls leading to an increase in infections in the unbearable heat.
“Due to the difficulty in managing the monthly menstrual cycle due to limited access to water sanitation hygiene and period poverty, many teenage girls prefer to get pregnant to save them the worry of menstruating monthly for nine months.”
Dr Chinedu Anthony Iwu, who works at a health facility in Orlu Local Government Area in Nigeria, describes how working with communities can build resilience to climate change impacts.
“The changing climate has brought about an increase in the prevalence of vector-borne diseases. Mosquitoes are now breeding and transmitting diseases like malaria more intensely. The community lacked proper health care facilities and resources to effectively combat these diseases, leading to a rise in illness and mortality rates. Mothers’ means of livelihood were usually disrupted due to the time and effort spent in caring for their sick children with a significant impact on household welfare.
“Recognising the urgent need to address these climate-related health challenges, we engaged in community-led initiatives that included comprehensive health awareness campaigns to provide education on sanitation and hygiene practices, and education of residents about preventive measures against vector-borne diseases. By engaging our community health extension workers, we were able to organise regular health check-ups in the communities, focusing on early detection and treatment of illnesses.
“Over time, these collective efforts began to yield positive results. The mothers in the communities witnessed improvements in income as they progressively began to spend less time pursuing children’s health care challenges due to the adoption of preventive measures, thereby becoming more resilient to the changing climate.
This experience highlights the challenges faced by rural communities in Nigeria due to climate change. It demonstrates the importance of community engagement, sustainable practices, and support from relevant stakeholders in addressing the climate-health nexus and building resilience in the face of a changing climate.”
Photo credit: Aerial view of a flooded urban residential area of Dera Allah yar city in Jaffarabad District, Baluchistan Province, Pakistan. Credit: Gavi/2022/Asad Zaidi
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#climateAndHealth #climateChange #Gavi #immunization #TheGenevaLearningFoundation #VaccinesWork
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By John Helmer
We’re in a world where people don’t really understand what they want until you put it in front of them,’ says Toby Green Head of Publishing at OECD. He’s talking about the challenge of creating new digital products in a technology landscape that is changing very quickly (with no end to the ‘technology treadmill’ in sight) and where market research is of limited value; where what happened in the past in educational publishing is a poor guide to what will happen in the future.
This reflection comes from looking at OECD’s markets, which span both higher education and the workplace, and a remit that embraces not only information dissemination but, to a degree, instruction. We’re talking convergence.
Toby Green will chair the plenary session on ‘Cross-fertilisation’ at the ALPSP International Conference. The convergence of the education and workplace learning markets is likely to be a theme for this session, so we took the opportunity to convene a three-way discussion involving Reda Sadki, a learning innovation strategist who is working with OECD on precisely this area.
We discussed drivers for convergence, some of its effects, and also opportunities and threats for publishers.
Moving beyond a dissemination mindset
Reda’s vantage point on this phenomenon of convergence is informed by his time at the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (the IFRC), where he pivoted from managing publishing to ‘learning systems’. The IFRC, he says, was an organization that published massive amounts of information (750 information products, 12 million printed pages in 2009), with “little measurable impact”. ‘Ultimately I came to the realisation that the value in what was being published by the world’s largest humanitarian network could be found in the instructional and training materials, with a global audience of 17 million Red Cross and Red Crescent volunteers. Where you could find impact was in the publications that teach people in a humanitarian emergency how to do very basic things such as putting up a tent and providing first aid care.’
He characterises the transition this realisation prompted as being from a concern over maximising dissemination – counting eyeballs and downloads – to looking at a deeper kind of impact in terms of what was happening behind the eyeballs. It is a shift that he implies publishers need to make themselves if they are to capitalise on the opportunities offered by this convergence.
Drivers of convergence
Reda sees two fundamental shifts driving convergence.
One is about changes in the economy of effort to do certain things. Publishing starts with dissemination and under the traditional model would tend to stop at that. It doesn’t necessary look at look at what people are doing with what it disseminates – largely because, pre-internet, it would have been uneconomic to do so. Technology has lowered the cost of, for instance, collecting rich data about what people are doing with a particular piece of knowledge.
The other is about the changing nature of knowledge itself. The book gave us a ‘container’ view of knowledge, where now – with knowledge flows getting faster all the time – it looks more like a process than a product. Attempts to capture and compartmentalise knowledge are doomed to fail, in his view, as they do not provide the answers that we need to be able to provide it in any useful way. Being an expert today is much more about knowing where and knowing how than it is about the individual accumulating large amounts of knowledge.
Echoing Reda’s first point, but framing it in a perhaps broader context, Toby sees the appearance of new possibilities for action with the advent of digital as the decisive factor. ‘If you think of the offline world, on both the publishing side and the education/training side, there were some natural constraints to what you could do …’
The book (or textbook, or journal) was bound. It had a finite number of pages and could be shipped to only so many people. The classroom could only have a finite number of people in it, and was very difficult to scale without massive expense in both infrastructure and people (i.e. teachers). Online removes a lot of those scaling constraints; so a class that could previously only reach 30 people can now reach hundreds of thousands.
Online has also massively lowered the cost of updating published information. A new print edition of a textbook, for example, is a major undertaking. In the offline world updates to knowledge would happen in batches, because it wasn’t feasible to do it in any other way. Online allows you to have a rolling update – giving us the concept of a living book – or, equally, a course that is constantly being tweaked and kept up to date.
These changes allow new ways of thinking. There are significant changes to the old paradigms – but they are changes that a lot of people are still trying to get used to, both on the education side and on the publishing side.
One area that publishing has been very successful in, Toby feels is integrating technology with content, and he gave several examples of workflow tools such as Mendeley that bear this out, and the work of other players in the wider information industry such as Bloomberg and Reuters.
However going beyond these essentially resource-based models and becoming more instrumental in the process of learning is another matter, and considering this led us to look at the different cultures these converging (or colliding) industries have.
Culture and authority
One of the most beautiful things about publishing, in Reda’s view, is the way in which culture, in both the specific and the wider senses of that word, is embedded in its fabric. This gives a different feel for the value of the content, and its importance in terms of the emotional relationship we have with works of the mind and aspects such as cultural diversity in what is published. While e-learning taps into a rich history of learning theories and education, it still has something to learn, he feels, from the culture of publishing in this respect.
Knowledge management, by contrast – which he feels to have failed – seems obsessed with putting pieces of data into pigeonholes, without proper regards to the more important activity of building a culture to make sense of the vast amounts of information and data that organisations receive and generate.
From the publishing side, Toby observed that the linkage of education and training has always been weak. Textbook sales were seen as by-product of publishing activity, where existing titles were picked up on by educators – or else the preserve of a highly specialised branch of publishing that knew how to do them.
Now, with the collapse of barriers that limited thinking in the offline world, and with digital reducing costs and lowering barriers to entry, the idea of publishers working with partners to adapt their content to create courses is far more achievable. And here is a further cultural change: the idea of working with partners. ‘Before, companies did everything themselves; they didn’t really use networks of freelancers and partners in the way we do now’.
My own reflection on the different cultures, having worked in e-learning and digital publishing, is that there is less concern about provenance of knowledge on the training side of the fence. Academic publishing has a culture of sources, citation and reference that is currently in the process of automating in a characteristically rigorous way (CrossRef, ORCID, etc.). In e-learning, on the other hand, where content is often produced using an organisation’s internal SME knowledge, individual authorship tends to be more submerged, and it is often possible to wonder: where is this point of view coming from; who is telling me this?
As somebody who works for a ‘who’ (the OECD) Toby can’t help but believe that at the point of convergence, this difference offers an opportunity for organisations like his own whose content carries the stamp of accepted and established authority in their particular field. This could also apply to the learned societies, but doesn’t necessarily hold true for larger, more generalist commercial publishers.
Effects of convergence, chilling and otherwise
Given the way that internet power laws operate in any online space – tending to favour one or a very few brands and condemn everyone else to place on the ‘long tail’, these questions of identity and authority are critical online. Certainly their effects have been seen in the case of MOOCs.
Arguably, it is the presence of educational ‘super-brands’ such as Harvard and Stanford that has allowed online education to break through to public consciousness in the way it now has, under the banner of MOOCs. Interestingly however, other HE institutions in this rarified upper strata that have chosen not to participate in this gold-rush so far – notably Oxford and Cambridge in the UK – don’t seem to be especially troubled by the phenomenon.
It is the ‘squeezed middle’ of second tier universities who see MOOCs as a threat to their livelihood, and the opinion of many is that solution in future will be for institutions to find or build specialisms in particular unique areas. Get ‘niche’.
Reda locates a particular opportunity here in the troubled issue of ‘the fit in today’s world of the capacity of universities to prepare people for the workforce or for the demands of society’. Sub-degree, competency-based qualifications represent, in his view, ‘a huge gaping hole’ that knowledge-producing institutions are in a privileged position to address.
He cites a client he worked with who had seen an Oxford University course on the area they worked in, but believed they could themselves build one ‘a hundred times better’. This sparked for him the idea that an organisation that has the practice – that actually does the job – could now, through the affordances of technology, build an educational offering of high quality.
An organisation that in addition starts with a strong publishing function is particularly well placed since they will already have the quality development processes that will make it much easier to build educational experiences around that content.
Playing the long game
Of course, underlying all this talk of opportunities is the necessity for publishers to make their digital investments pay, and while moving into creating educational experiences around content might represent an opportunity for some organisations, there usually has to be some threat element in play to compel action.
Reda pointed to the scrabble for data around MOOCs, which as early as 2013 prompted publishers to offer access to their textbooks within MOOCs in return for the user data. In a data-driven world, he would consider not having some such access to this type of data as a risk.
This has to be see in the context of attempts by publishers to use digital to bring textbooks to life, not all of which have proved wildly successful with users, and the idea, argued by some, that MOOCs themselves are textbooks: that, ‘MOOCs perhaps represent the first form of digital textbook to reach a mass audience’.
Given factors like these, organisations can’t afford to not experiment and try new things if their businesses are to grow and survive.
In Toby’s view, publishers still largely think they’re in the business of selling content. He sees very few examples of textbook publishers migrating online in a way that works. ‘Part of the challenge is that since individuals are so reluctant to spend any money for content online – and bearing in mind that the offline textbook market was largely an individual-purchase model – it is very hard to see how a textbook publisher is going to get a return if they simply put their textbook online’.
Data driven-models mean that money is made elsewhere than in the same transaction, so the challenge is to look at your publishing business in the round. A publisher such as Wiley, whose acquisitions in the learning space follow a strategy around the lifetime value of a customer – from education through to their professional life – might (notionally) balance losses in one part of the business by larger gains in another. This would involve looking at the value of the individual rather than the value of the training.
‘That’s what makes the web so hard, but at the same time so interesting: you have to consider where the value is, and the lifetime value could be very long … it’s very difficult to look individually at each particular piece: you have to look at it holistically.’
#digitalTransformation #JohnHelmer #learning #OECD #publishing #Semantico #TobyGreen
-
By John Helmer
We’re in a world where people don’t really understand what they want until you put it in front of them,’ says Toby Green Head of Publishing at OECD. He’s talking about the challenge of creating new digital products in a technology landscape that is changing very quickly (with no end to the ‘technology treadmill’ in sight) and where market research is of limited value; where what happened in the past in educational publishing is a poor guide to what will happen in the future.
This reflection comes from looking at OECD’s markets, which span both higher education and the workplace, and a remit that embraces not only information dissemination but, to a degree, instruction. We’re talking convergence.
Toby Green will chair the plenary session on ‘Cross-fertilisation’ at the ALPSP International Conference. The convergence of the education and workplace learning markets is likely to be a theme for this session, so we took the opportunity to convene a three-way discussion involving Reda Sadki, a learning innovation strategist who is working with OECD on precisely this area.
We discussed drivers for convergence, some of its effects, and also opportunities and threats for publishers.
Moving beyond a dissemination mindset
Reda’s vantage point on this phenomenon of convergence is informed by his time at the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (the IFRC), where he pivoted from managing publishing to ‘learning systems’. The IFRC, he says, was an organization that published massive amounts of information (750 information products, 12 million printed pages in 2009), with “little measurable impact”. ‘Ultimately I came to the realisation that the value in what was being published by the world’s largest humanitarian network could be found in the instructional and training materials, with a global audience of 17 million Red Cross and Red Crescent volunteers. Where you could find impact was in the publications that teach people in a humanitarian emergency how to do very basic things such as putting up a tent and providing first aid care.’
He characterises the transition this realisation prompted as being from a concern over maximising dissemination – counting eyeballs and downloads – to looking at a deeper kind of impact in terms of what was happening behind the eyeballs. It is a shift that he implies publishers need to make themselves if they are to capitalise on the opportunities offered by this convergence.
Drivers of convergence
Reda sees two fundamental shifts driving convergence.
One is about changes in the economy of effort to do certain things. Publishing starts with dissemination and under the traditional model would tend to stop at that. It doesn’t necessary look at look at what people are doing with what it disseminates – largely because, pre-internet, it would have been uneconomic to do so. Technology has lowered the cost of, for instance, collecting rich data about what people are doing with a particular piece of knowledge.
The other is about the changing nature of knowledge itself. The book gave us a ‘container’ view of knowledge, where now – with knowledge flows getting faster all the time – it looks more like a process than a product. Attempts to capture and compartmentalise knowledge are doomed to fail, in his view, as they do not provide the answers that we need to be able to provide it in any useful way. Being an expert today is much more about knowing where and knowing how than it is about the individual accumulating large amounts of knowledge.
Echoing Reda’s first point, but framing it in a perhaps broader context, Toby sees the appearance of new possibilities for action with the advent of digital as the decisive factor. ‘If you think of the offline world, on both the publishing side and the education/training side, there were some natural constraints to what you could do …’
The book (or textbook, or journal) was bound. It had a finite number of pages and could be shipped to only so many people. The classroom could only have a finite number of people in it, and was very difficult to scale without massive expense in both infrastructure and people (i.e. teachers). Online removes a lot of those scaling constraints; so a class that could previously only reach 30 people can now reach hundreds of thousands.
Online has also massively lowered the cost of updating published information. A new print edition of a textbook, for example, is a major undertaking. In the offline world updates to knowledge would happen in batches, because it wasn’t feasible to do it in any other way. Online allows you to have a rolling update – giving us the concept of a living book – or, equally, a course that is constantly being tweaked and kept up to date.
These changes allow new ways of thinking. There are significant changes to the old paradigms – but they are changes that a lot of people are still trying to get used to, both on the education side and on the publishing side.
One area that publishing has been very successful in, Toby feels is integrating technology with content, and he gave several examples of workflow tools such as Mendeley that bear this out, and the work of other players in the wider information industry such as Bloomberg and Reuters.
However going beyond these essentially resource-based models and becoming more instrumental in the process of learning is another matter, and considering this led us to look at the different cultures these converging (or colliding) industries have.
Culture and authority
One of the most beautiful things about publishing, in Reda’s view, is the way in which culture, in both the specific and the wider senses of that word, is embedded in its fabric. This gives a different feel for the value of the content, and its importance in terms of the emotional relationship we have with works of the mind and aspects such as cultural diversity in what is published. While e-learning taps into a rich history of learning theories and education, it still has something to learn, he feels, from the culture of publishing in this respect.
Knowledge management, by contrast – which he feels to have failed – seems obsessed with putting pieces of data into pigeonholes, without proper regards to the more important activity of building a culture to make sense of the vast amounts of information and data that organisations receive and generate.
From the publishing side, Toby observed that the linkage of education and training has always been weak. Textbook sales were seen as by-product of publishing activity, where existing titles were picked up on by educators – or else the preserve of a highly specialised branch of publishing that knew how to do them.
Now, with the collapse of barriers that limited thinking in the offline world, and with digital reducing costs and lowering barriers to entry, the idea of publishers working with partners to adapt their content to create courses is far more achievable. And here is a further cultural change: the idea of working with partners. ‘Before, companies did everything themselves; they didn’t really use networks of freelancers and partners in the way we do now’.
My own reflection on the different cultures, having worked in e-learning and digital publishing, is that there is less concern about provenance of knowledge on the training side of the fence. Academic publishing has a culture of sources, citation and reference that is currently in the process of automating in a characteristically rigorous way (CrossRef, ORCID, etc.). In e-learning, on the other hand, where content is often produced using an organisation’s internal SME knowledge, individual authorship tends to be more submerged, and it is often possible to wonder: where is this point of view coming from; who is telling me this?
As somebody who works for a ‘who’ (the OECD) Toby can’t help but believe that at the point of convergence, this difference offers an opportunity for organisations like his own whose content carries the stamp of accepted and established authority in their particular field. This could also apply to the learned societies, but doesn’t necessarily hold true for larger, more generalist commercial publishers.
Effects of convergence, chilling and otherwise
Given the way that internet power laws operate in any online space – tending to favour one or a very few brands and condemn everyone else to place on the ‘long tail’, these questions of identity and authority are critical online. Certainly their effects have been seen in the case of MOOCs.
Arguably, it is the presence of educational ‘super-brands’ such as Harvard and Stanford that has allowed online education to break through to public consciousness in the way it now has, under the banner of MOOCs. Interestingly however, other HE institutions in this rarified upper strata that have chosen not to participate in this gold-rush so far – notably Oxford and Cambridge in the UK – don’t seem to be especially troubled by the phenomenon.
It is the ‘squeezed middle’ of second tier universities who see MOOCs as a threat to their livelihood, and the opinion of many is that solution in future will be for institutions to find or build specialisms in particular unique areas. Get ‘niche’.
Reda locates a particular opportunity here in the troubled issue of ‘the fit in today’s world of the capacity of universities to prepare people for the workforce or for the demands of society’. Sub-degree, competency-based qualifications represent, in his view, ‘a huge gaping hole’ that knowledge-producing institutions are in a privileged position to address.
He cites a client he worked with who had seen an Oxford University course on the area they worked in, but believed they could themselves build one ‘a hundred times better’. This sparked for him the idea that an organisation that has the practice – that actually does the job – could now, through the affordances of technology, build an educational offering of high quality.
An organisation that in addition starts with a strong publishing function is particularly well placed since they will already have the quality development processes that will make it much easier to build educational experiences around that content.
Playing the long game
Of course, underlying all this talk of opportunities is the necessity for publishers to make their digital investments pay, and while moving into creating educational experiences around content might represent an opportunity for some organisations, there usually has to be some threat element in play to compel action.
Reda pointed to the scrabble for data around MOOCs, which as early as 2013 prompted publishers to offer access to their textbooks within MOOCs in return for the user data. In a data-driven world, he would consider not having some such access to this type of data as a risk.
This has to be see in the context of attempts by publishers to use digital to bring textbooks to life, not all of which have proved wildly successful with users, and the idea, argued by some, that MOOCs themselves are textbooks: that, ‘MOOCs perhaps represent the first form of digital textbook to reach a mass audience’.
Given factors like these, organisations can’t afford to not experiment and try new things if their businesses are to grow and survive.
In Toby’s view, publishers still largely think they’re in the business of selling content. He sees very few examples of textbook publishers migrating online in a way that works. ‘Part of the challenge is that since individuals are so reluctant to spend any money for content online – and bearing in mind that the offline textbook market was largely an individual-purchase model – it is very hard to see how a textbook publisher is going to get a return if they simply put their textbook online’.
Data driven-models mean that money is made elsewhere than in the same transaction, so the challenge is to look at your publishing business in the round. A publisher such as Wiley, whose acquisitions in the learning space follow a strategy around the lifetime value of a customer – from education through to their professional life – might (notionally) balance losses in one part of the business by larger gains in another. This would involve looking at the value of the individual rather than the value of the training.
‘That’s what makes the web so hard, but at the same time so interesting: you have to consider where the value is, and the lifetime value could be very long … it’s very difficult to look individually at each particular piece: you have to look at it holistically.’
#digitalTransformation #JohnHelmer #learning #OECD #publishing #Semantico #TobyGreen
-
By John Helmer
We’re in a world where people don’t really understand what they want until you put it in front of them,’ says Toby Green Head of Publishing at OECD. He’s talking about the challenge of creating new digital products in a technology landscape that is changing very quickly (with no end to the ‘technology treadmill’ in sight) and where market research is of limited value; where what happened in the past in educational publishing is a poor guide to what will happen in the future.
This reflection comes from looking at OECD’s markets, which span both higher education and the workplace, and a remit that embraces not only information dissemination but, to a degree, instruction. We’re talking convergence.
Toby Green will chair the plenary session on ‘Cross-fertilisation’ at the ALPSP International Conference. The convergence of the education and workplace learning markets is likely to be a theme for this session, so we took the opportunity to convene a three-way discussion involving Reda Sadki, a learning innovation strategist who is working with OECD on precisely this area.
We discussed drivers for convergence, some of its effects, and also opportunities and threats for publishers.
Moving beyond a dissemination mindset
Reda’s vantage point on this phenomenon of convergence is informed by his time at the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (the IFRC), where he pivoted from managing publishing to ‘learning systems’. The IFRC, he says, was an organization that published massive amounts of information (750 information products, 12 million printed pages in 2009), with “little measurable impact”. ‘Ultimately I came to the realisation that the value in what was being published by the world’s largest humanitarian network could be found in the instructional and training materials, with a global audience of 17 million Red Cross and Red Crescent volunteers. Where you could find impact was in the publications that teach people in a humanitarian emergency how to do very basic things such as putting up a tent and providing first aid care.’
He characterises the transition this realisation prompted as being from a concern over maximising dissemination – counting eyeballs and downloads – to looking at a deeper kind of impact in terms of what was happening behind the eyeballs. It is a shift that he implies publishers need to make themselves if they are to capitalise on the opportunities offered by this convergence.
Drivers of convergence
Reda sees two fundamental shifts driving convergence.
One is about changes in the economy of effort to do certain things. Publishing starts with dissemination and under the traditional model would tend to stop at that. It doesn’t necessary look at look at what people are doing with what it disseminates – largely because, pre-internet, it would have been uneconomic to do so. Technology has lowered the cost of, for instance, collecting rich data about what people are doing with a particular piece of knowledge.
The other is about the changing nature of knowledge itself. The book gave us a ‘container’ view of knowledge, where now – with knowledge flows getting faster all the time – it looks more like a process than a product. Attempts to capture and compartmentalise knowledge are doomed to fail, in his view, as they do not provide the answers that we need to be able to provide it in any useful way. Being an expert today is much more about knowing where and knowing how than it is about the individual accumulating large amounts of knowledge.
Echoing Reda’s first point, but framing it in a perhaps broader context, Toby sees the appearance of new possibilities for action with the advent of digital as the decisive factor. ‘If you think of the offline world, on both the publishing side and the education/training side, there were some natural constraints to what you could do …’
The book (or textbook, or journal) was bound. It had a finite number of pages and could be shipped to only so many people. The classroom could only have a finite number of people in it, and was very difficult to scale without massive expense in both infrastructure and people (i.e. teachers). Online removes a lot of those scaling constraints; so a class that could previously only reach 30 people can now reach hundreds of thousands.
Online has also massively lowered the cost of updating published information. A new print edition of a textbook, for example, is a major undertaking. In the offline world updates to knowledge would happen in batches, because it wasn’t feasible to do it in any other way. Online allows you to have a rolling update – giving us the concept of a living book – or, equally, a course that is constantly being tweaked and kept up to date.
These changes allow new ways of thinking. There are significant changes to the old paradigms – but they are changes that a lot of people are still trying to get used to, both on the education side and on the publishing side.
One area that publishing has been very successful in, Toby feels is integrating technology with content, and he gave several examples of workflow tools such as Mendeley that bear this out, and the work of other players in the wider information industry such as Bloomberg and Reuters.
However going beyond these essentially resource-based models and becoming more instrumental in the process of learning is another matter, and considering this led us to look at the different cultures these converging (or colliding) industries have.
Culture and authority
One of the most beautiful things about publishing, in Reda’s view, is the way in which culture, in both the specific and the wider senses of that word, is embedded in its fabric. This gives a different feel for the value of the content, and its importance in terms of the emotional relationship we have with works of the mind and aspects such as cultural diversity in what is published. While e-learning taps into a rich history of learning theories and education, it still has something to learn, he feels, from the culture of publishing in this respect.
Knowledge management, by contrast – which he feels to have failed – seems obsessed with putting pieces of data into pigeonholes, without proper regards to the more important activity of building a culture to make sense of the vast amounts of information and data that organisations receive and generate.
From the publishing side, Toby observed that the linkage of education and training has always been weak. Textbook sales were seen as by-product of publishing activity, where existing titles were picked up on by educators – or else the preserve of a highly specialised branch of publishing that knew how to do them.
Now, with the collapse of barriers that limited thinking in the offline world, and with digital reducing costs and lowering barriers to entry, the idea of publishers working with partners to adapt their content to create courses is far more achievable. And here is a further cultural change: the idea of working with partners. ‘Before, companies did everything themselves; they didn’t really use networks of freelancers and partners in the way we do now’.
My own reflection on the different cultures, having worked in e-learning and digital publishing, is that there is less concern about provenance of knowledge on the training side of the fence. Academic publishing has a culture of sources, citation and reference that is currently in the process of automating in a characteristically rigorous way (CrossRef, ORCID, etc.). In e-learning, on the other hand, where content is often produced using an organisation’s internal SME knowledge, individual authorship tends to be more submerged, and it is often possible to wonder: where is this point of view coming from; who is telling me this?
As somebody who works for a ‘who’ (the OECD) Toby can’t help but believe that at the point of convergence, this difference offers an opportunity for organisations like his own whose content carries the stamp of accepted and established authority in their particular field. This could also apply to the learned societies, but doesn’t necessarily hold true for larger, more generalist commercial publishers.
Effects of convergence, chilling and otherwise
Given the way that internet power laws operate in any online space – tending to favour one or a very few brands and condemn everyone else to place on the ‘long tail’, these questions of identity and authority are critical online. Certainly their effects have been seen in the case of MOOCs.
Arguably, it is the presence of educational ‘super-brands’ such as Harvard and Stanford that has allowed online education to break through to public consciousness in the way it now has, under the banner of MOOCs. Interestingly however, other HE institutions in this rarified upper strata that have chosen not to participate in this gold-rush so far – notably Oxford and Cambridge in the UK – don’t seem to be especially troubled by the phenomenon.
It is the ‘squeezed middle’ of second tier universities who see MOOCs as a threat to their livelihood, and the opinion of many is that solution in future will be for institutions to find or build specialisms in particular unique areas. Get ‘niche’.
Reda locates a particular opportunity here in the troubled issue of ‘the fit in today’s world of the capacity of universities to prepare people for the workforce or for the demands of society’. Sub-degree, competency-based qualifications represent, in his view, ‘a huge gaping hole’ that knowledge-producing institutions are in a privileged position to address.
He cites a client he worked with who had seen an Oxford University course on the area they worked in, but believed they could themselves build one ‘a hundred times better’. This sparked for him the idea that an organisation that has the practice – that actually does the job – could now, through the affordances of technology, build an educational offering of high quality.
An organisation that in addition starts with a strong publishing function is particularly well placed since they will already have the quality development processes that will make it much easier to build educational experiences around that content.
Playing the long game
Of course, underlying all this talk of opportunities is the necessity for publishers to make their digital investments pay, and while moving into creating educational experiences around content might represent an opportunity for some organisations, there usually has to be some threat element in play to compel action.
Reda pointed to the scrabble for data around MOOCs, which as early as 2013 prompted publishers to offer access to their textbooks within MOOCs in return for the user data. In a data-driven world, he would consider not having some such access to this type of data as a risk.
This has to be see in the context of attempts by publishers to use digital to bring textbooks to life, not all of which have proved wildly successful with users, and the idea, argued by some, that MOOCs themselves are textbooks: that, ‘MOOCs perhaps represent the first form of digital textbook to reach a mass audience’.
Given factors like these, organisations can’t afford to not experiment and try new things if their businesses are to grow and survive.
In Toby’s view, publishers still largely think they’re in the business of selling content. He sees very few examples of textbook publishers migrating online in a way that works. ‘Part of the challenge is that since individuals are so reluctant to spend any money for content online – and bearing in mind that the offline textbook market was largely an individual-purchase model – it is very hard to see how a textbook publisher is going to get a return if they simply put their textbook online’.
Data driven-models mean that money is made elsewhere than in the same transaction, so the challenge is to look at your publishing business in the round. A publisher such as Wiley, whose acquisitions in the learning space follow a strategy around the lifetime value of a customer – from education through to their professional life – might (notionally) balance losses in one part of the business by larger gains in another. This would involve looking at the value of the individual rather than the value of the training.
‘That’s what makes the web so hard, but at the same time so interesting: you have to consider where the value is, and the lifetime value could be very long … it’s very difficult to look individually at each particular piece: you have to look at it holistically.’
#digitalTransformation #JohnHelmer #learning #OECD #publishing #Semantico #TobyGreen
-
By John Helmer
We’re in a world where people don’t really understand what they want until you put it in front of them,’ says Toby Green Head of Publishing at OECD. He’s talking about the challenge of creating new digital products in a technology landscape that is changing very quickly (with no end to the ‘technology treadmill’ in sight) and where market research is of limited value; where what happened in the past in educational publishing is a poor guide to what will happen in the future.
This reflection comes from looking at OECD’s markets, which span both higher education and the workplace, and a remit that embraces not only information dissemination but, to a degree, instruction. We’re talking convergence.
Toby Green will chair the plenary session on ‘Cross-fertilisation’ at the ALPSP International Conference. The convergence of the education and workplace learning markets is likely to be a theme for this session, so we took the opportunity to convene a three-way discussion involving Reda Sadki, a learning innovation strategist who is working with OECD on precisely this area.
We discussed drivers for convergence, some of its effects, and also opportunities and threats for publishers.
Moving beyond a dissemination mindset
Reda’s vantage point on this phenomenon of convergence is informed by his time at the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (the IFRC), where he pivoted from managing publishing to ‘learning systems’. The IFRC, he says, was an organization that published massive amounts of information (750 information products, 12 million printed pages in 2009), with “little measurable impact”. ‘Ultimately I came to the realisation that the value in what was being published by the world’s largest humanitarian network could be found in the instructional and training materials, with a global audience of 17 million Red Cross and Red Crescent volunteers. Where you could find impact was in the publications that teach people in a humanitarian emergency how to do very basic things such as putting up a tent and providing first aid care.’
He characterises the transition this realisation prompted as being from a concern over maximising dissemination – counting eyeballs and downloads – to looking at a deeper kind of impact in terms of what was happening behind the eyeballs. It is a shift that he implies publishers need to make themselves if they are to capitalise on the opportunities offered by this convergence.
Drivers of convergence
Reda sees two fundamental shifts driving convergence.
One is about changes in the economy of effort to do certain things. Publishing starts with dissemination and under the traditional model would tend to stop at that. It doesn’t necessary look at look at what people are doing with what it disseminates – largely because, pre-internet, it would have been uneconomic to do so. Technology has lowered the cost of, for instance, collecting rich data about what people are doing with a particular piece of knowledge.
The other is about the changing nature of knowledge itself. The book gave us a ‘container’ view of knowledge, where now – with knowledge flows getting faster all the time – it looks more like a process than a product. Attempts to capture and compartmentalise knowledge are doomed to fail, in his view, as they do not provide the answers that we need to be able to provide it in any useful way. Being an expert today is much more about knowing where and knowing how than it is about the individual accumulating large amounts of knowledge.
Echoing Reda’s first point, but framing it in a perhaps broader context, Toby sees the appearance of new possibilities for action with the advent of digital as the decisive factor. ‘If you think of the offline world, on both the publishing side and the education/training side, there were some natural constraints to what you could do …’
The book (or textbook, or journal) was bound. It had a finite number of pages and could be shipped to only so many people. The classroom could only have a finite number of people in it, and was very difficult to scale without massive expense in both infrastructure and people (i.e. teachers). Online removes a lot of those scaling constraints; so a class that could previously only reach 30 people can now reach hundreds of thousands.
Online has also massively lowered the cost of updating published information. A new print edition of a textbook, for example, is a major undertaking. In the offline world updates to knowledge would happen in batches, because it wasn’t feasible to do it in any other way. Online allows you to have a rolling update – giving us the concept of a living book – or, equally, a course that is constantly being tweaked and kept up to date.
These changes allow new ways of thinking. There are significant changes to the old paradigms – but they are changes that a lot of people are still trying to get used to, both on the education side and on the publishing side.
One area that publishing has been very successful in, Toby feels is integrating technology with content, and he gave several examples of workflow tools such as Mendeley that bear this out, and the work of other players in the wider information industry such as Bloomberg and Reuters.
However going beyond these essentially resource-based models and becoming more instrumental in the process of learning is another matter, and considering this led us to look at the different cultures these converging (or colliding) industries have.
Culture and authority
One of the most beautiful things about publishing, in Reda’s view, is the way in which culture, in both the specific and the wider senses of that word, is embedded in its fabric. This gives a different feel for the value of the content, and its importance in terms of the emotional relationship we have with works of the mind and aspects such as cultural diversity in what is published. While e-learning taps into a rich history of learning theories and education, it still has something to learn, he feels, from the culture of publishing in this respect.
Knowledge management, by contrast – which he feels to have failed – seems obsessed with putting pieces of data into pigeonholes, without proper regards to the more important activity of building a culture to make sense of the vast amounts of information and data that organisations receive and generate.
From the publishing side, Toby observed that the linkage of education and training has always been weak. Textbook sales were seen as by-product of publishing activity, where existing titles were picked up on by educators – or else the preserve of a highly specialised branch of publishing that knew how to do them.
Now, with the collapse of barriers that limited thinking in the offline world, and with digital reducing costs and lowering barriers to entry, the idea of publishers working with partners to adapt their content to create courses is far more achievable. And here is a further cultural change: the idea of working with partners. ‘Before, companies did everything themselves; they didn’t really use networks of freelancers and partners in the way we do now’.
My own reflection on the different cultures, having worked in e-learning and digital publishing, is that there is less concern about provenance of knowledge on the training side of the fence. Academic publishing has a culture of sources, citation and reference that is currently in the process of automating in a characteristically rigorous way (CrossRef, ORCID, etc.). In e-learning, on the other hand, where content is often produced using an organisation’s internal SME knowledge, individual authorship tends to be more submerged, and it is often possible to wonder: where is this point of view coming from; who is telling me this?
As somebody who works for a ‘who’ (the OECD) Toby can’t help but believe that at the point of convergence, this difference offers an opportunity for organisations like his own whose content carries the stamp of accepted and established authority in their particular field. This could also apply to the learned societies, but doesn’t necessarily hold true for larger, more generalist commercial publishers.
Effects of convergence, chilling and otherwise
Given the way that internet power laws operate in any online space – tending to favour one or a very few brands and condemn everyone else to place on the ‘long tail’, these questions of identity and authority are critical online. Certainly their effects have been seen in the case of MOOCs.
Arguably, it is the presence of educational ‘super-brands’ such as Harvard and Stanford that has allowed online education to break through to public consciousness in the way it now has, under the banner of MOOCs. Interestingly however, other HE institutions in this rarified upper strata that have chosen not to participate in this gold-rush so far – notably Oxford and Cambridge in the UK – don’t seem to be especially troubled by the phenomenon.
It is the ‘squeezed middle’ of second tier universities who see MOOCs as a threat to their livelihood, and the opinion of many is that solution in future will be for institutions to find or build specialisms in particular unique areas. Get ‘niche’.
Reda locates a particular opportunity here in the troubled issue of ‘the fit in today’s world of the capacity of universities to prepare people for the workforce or for the demands of society’. Sub-degree, competency-based qualifications represent, in his view, ‘a huge gaping hole’ that knowledge-producing institutions are in a privileged position to address.
He cites a client he worked with who had seen an Oxford University course on the area they worked in, but believed they could themselves build one ‘a hundred times better’. This sparked for him the idea that an organisation that has the practice – that actually does the job – could now, through the affordances of technology, build an educational offering of high quality.
An organisation that in addition starts with a strong publishing function is particularly well placed since they will already have the quality development processes that will make it much easier to build educational experiences around that content.
Playing the long game
Of course, underlying all this talk of opportunities is the necessity for publishers to make their digital investments pay, and while moving into creating educational experiences around content might represent an opportunity for some organisations, there usually has to be some threat element in play to compel action.
Reda pointed to the scrabble for data around MOOCs, which as early as 2013 prompted publishers to offer access to their textbooks within MOOCs in return for the user data. In a data-driven world, he would consider not having some such access to this type of data as a risk.
This has to be see in the context of attempts by publishers to use digital to bring textbooks to life, not all of which have proved wildly successful with users, and the idea, argued by some, that MOOCs themselves are textbooks: that, ‘MOOCs perhaps represent the first form of digital textbook to reach a mass audience’.
Given factors like these, organisations can’t afford to not experiment and try new things if their businesses are to grow and survive.
In Toby’s view, publishers still largely think they’re in the business of selling content. He sees very few examples of textbook publishers migrating online in a way that works. ‘Part of the challenge is that since individuals are so reluctant to spend any money for content online – and bearing in mind that the offline textbook market was largely an individual-purchase model – it is very hard to see how a textbook publisher is going to get a return if they simply put their textbook online’.
Data driven-models mean that money is made elsewhere than in the same transaction, so the challenge is to look at your publishing business in the round. A publisher such as Wiley, whose acquisitions in the learning space follow a strategy around the lifetime value of a customer – from education through to their professional life – might (notionally) balance losses in one part of the business by larger gains in another. This would involve looking at the value of the individual rather than the value of the training.
‘That’s what makes the web so hard, but at the same time so interesting: you have to consider where the value is, and the lifetime value could be very long … it’s very difficult to look individually at each particular piece: you have to look at it holistically.’
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#digitalTransformation #JohnHelmer #learning #OECD #publishing #Semantico #TobyGreen
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The ongoing war in Ukraine has taken a severe toll on the population’s mental health and psychosocial wellbeing. A new interdisciplinary review from the ARQ National Psychotrauma Centre and VU Amsterdam provides an in-depth analysis of the mental health impacts, cultural and historical factors shaping coping and help-seeking, the evolving humanitarian response, and recommendations for strengthening mental health and psychosocial support (MHPSS) in Ukraine.
The report is an interdisciplinary literature review supplemented by key informant interviews. It synthesizes academic publications, gray literature, media reports and policy documents in English, Ukrainian and Russian. The review team included Ukrainian practitioners and regional experts to identify additional Ukrainian-language sources.
The review found that the war has led to high levels of acute psychological distress, increased risk of the development of future mental health problems, exacerbation of chronic mental health conditions, psychosocial problems, and an increase in substance use. Exposure to war-related trauma and violence, coupled with the loss of social support systems, poses lifelong risks for a range of mental health issues. Internally displaced persons (IDPs) are particularly vulnerable, with previous research showing that “32% of IDPs in Ukraine experienced post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and 22% had depression.”
Children’s mental health is a critical concern, with “three out of four parents report[ing] signs of psychological trauma in their children” such as “impaired memory, inattention, and learning difficulties.” Over 1.2 million children are internally displaced, with approximately 91,000 separated from family care. These are “the most vulnerable children […] living outside their families, residential institutions for children without parental care or boarding schools, unaccompanied and separated children, and children with disabilities.” Displacement disrupts education, social networks and routines. Adolescents struggle most to adapt and connect with new peers. Older children are taking on caregiver roles for younger siblings. The review identifies a lack of policies and programs specifically targeting child and adolescent mental health as a key gap.
Ukraine’s complex history has shaped current attitudes and practices around mental health. The review notes that “Ukraine’s historical memory is fragmented, with evaluations of events varying significantly among different population groups,” compounded by “Russia’s historic and contemporary efforts to rewrite Ukrainian history.” Soviet-era legacies of stigma, institutionalization, and the misuse of psychiatry have bred mistrust of formal mental health services, according to the review. Instead, “help seeking behaviour tends to be directed toward spiritual leaders (clergy) and practices.” Religious beliefs and leaders play an important role in mental health coping and support.
High levels of societal stigma toward mental illness persist, rooted in cultural norms that view psychological distress as a personal weakness or moral failing. Many Ukrainians hide their struggles and avoid seeking professional help due to fears of being perceived as ‘weak,’ receiving a diagnosis that could jeopardize employment, or being involuntarily hospitalized. “Ukrainians still perceive psychiatrists as being highly likely to disclose information about mental health and psychosocial disorders with employers, and therefore, even a single visit to a psychiatric hospital may destroy the future […] There is a particular tendency to hide suicidal thoughts due to high levels of fear of involuntary hospitalisation”, says the report.
Since 2014, conflict-affected areas in Eastern Ukraine have seen an influx of MHPSS services through humanitarian efforts, while recent national reforms have aimed to decentralize and deinstitutionalize mental healthcare. However, the current crisis has disrupted these reform efforts while dramatically increasing MHPSS needs. This presents both challenges and opportunities to “build on available resources” and integrate “successes of the emergency response into building more sustainable mental health care systems.”
The review highlights the stark regional disparities in MHPSS needs and capacities due to variations in conflict exposure, displacement patterns, infrastructure damage, and pre-existing resources. Areas affected by armed conflict face acute challenges, including widespread mine contamination, community distrust, and decimated health services. Meanwhile, safer areas in Western Ukraine are straining to meet the needs of large displaced populations. However, they also have more MHPSS responders and opportunities for longer-term interventions.
To address these complex challenges, the authors stress the importance of cross-sectoral coordination, building on local capacities and cultural resources, and strengthening partnerships between government, civil society, and faith-based organizations. Rigorous research on MHPSS interventions in conflict-affected Ukraine can inform evidence-based responses in the country and globally.
The review provides a roadmap for strengthening Ukraine’s MHPSS response through a focus on sustainable, locally-grounded, and trauma-informed approaches. While the needs are vast, there are also opportunities to transform mental healthcare and build resilience.
Reference: Iryna Frankova, Megan Leigh Bahmad, Ganna Goloktionova, Orest Suvalo, Kateryna Khyzhniak, 2024. Mental Health and Psychosocial Support in Ukraine: Coping, Help-seeking and Health Systems Strengthening in Times of War. ARQ National Psychotrauma Centre and VU Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands.
Image: The Geneva Learning Foundation Collection © 2024
#armedConflict #coping #mentalHealth #MHPSS #psychosocialSupport #Ukraine #war
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The ongoing war in Ukraine has taken a severe toll on the population’s mental health and psychosocial wellbeing. A new interdisciplinary review from the ARQ National Psychotrauma Centre and VU Amsterdam provides an in-depth analysis of the mental health impacts, cultural and historical factors shaping coping and help-seeking, the evolving humanitarian response, and recommendations for strengthening mental health and psychosocial support (MHPSS) in Ukraine.
The report is an interdisciplinary literature review supplemented by key informant interviews. It synthesizes academic publications, gray literature, media reports and policy documents in English, Ukrainian and Russian. The review team included Ukrainian practitioners and regional experts to identify additional Ukrainian-language sources.
The review found that the war has led to high levels of acute psychological distress, increased risk of the development of future mental health problems, exacerbation of chronic mental health conditions, psychosocial problems, and an increase in substance use. Exposure to war-related trauma and violence, coupled with the loss of social support systems, poses lifelong risks for a range of mental health issues. Internally displaced persons (IDPs) are particularly vulnerable, with previous research showing that “32% of IDPs in Ukraine experienced post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and 22% had depression.”
Children’s mental health is a critical concern, with “three out of four parents report[ing] signs of psychological trauma in their children” such as “impaired memory, inattention, and learning difficulties.” Over 1.2 million children are internally displaced, with approximately 91,000 separated from family care. These are “the most vulnerable children […] living outside their families, residential institutions for children without parental care or boarding schools, unaccompanied and separated children, and children with disabilities.” Displacement disrupts education, social networks and routines. Adolescents struggle most to adapt and connect with new peers. Older children are taking on caregiver roles for younger siblings. The review identifies a lack of policies and programs specifically targeting child and adolescent mental health as a key gap.
Ukraine’s complex history has shaped current attitudes and practices around mental health. The review notes that “Ukraine’s historical memory is fragmented, with evaluations of events varying significantly among different population groups,” compounded by “Russia’s historic and contemporary efforts to rewrite Ukrainian history.” Soviet-era legacies of stigma, institutionalization, and the misuse of psychiatry have bred mistrust of formal mental health services, according to the review. Instead, “help seeking behaviour tends to be directed toward spiritual leaders (clergy) and practices.” Religious beliefs and leaders play an important role in mental health coping and support.
High levels of societal stigma toward mental illness persist, rooted in cultural norms that view psychological distress as a personal weakness or moral failing. Many Ukrainians hide their struggles and avoid seeking professional help due to fears of being perceived as ‘weak,’ receiving a diagnosis that could jeopardize employment, or being involuntarily hospitalized. “Ukrainians still perceive psychiatrists as being highly likely to disclose information about mental health and psychosocial disorders with employers, and therefore, even a single visit to a psychiatric hospital may destroy the future […] There is a particular tendency to hide suicidal thoughts due to high levels of fear of involuntary hospitalisation”, says the report.
Since 2014, conflict-affected areas in Eastern Ukraine have seen an influx of MHPSS services through humanitarian efforts, while recent national reforms have aimed to decentralize and deinstitutionalize mental healthcare. However, the current crisis has disrupted these reform efforts while dramatically increasing MHPSS needs. This presents both challenges and opportunities to “build on available resources” and integrate “successes of the emergency response into building more sustainable mental health care systems.”
The review highlights the stark regional disparities in MHPSS needs and capacities due to variations in conflict exposure, displacement patterns, infrastructure damage, and pre-existing resources. Areas affected by armed conflict face acute challenges, including widespread mine contamination, community distrust, and decimated health services. Meanwhile, safer areas in Western Ukraine are straining to meet the needs of large displaced populations. However, they also have more MHPSS responders and opportunities for longer-term interventions.
To address these complex challenges, the authors stress the importance of cross-sectoral coordination, building on local capacities and cultural resources, and strengthening partnerships between government, civil society, and faith-based organizations. Rigorous research on MHPSS interventions in conflict-affected Ukraine can inform evidence-based responses in the country and globally.
The review provides a roadmap for strengthening Ukraine’s MHPSS response through a focus on sustainable, locally-grounded, and trauma-informed approaches. While the needs are vast, there are also opportunities to transform mental healthcare and build resilience.
Reference: Iryna Frankova, Megan Leigh Bahmad, Ganna Goloktionova, Orest Suvalo, Kateryna Khyzhniak, 2024. Mental Health and Psychosocial Support in Ukraine: Coping, Help-seeking and Health Systems Strengthening in Times of War. ARQ National Psychotrauma Centre and VU Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands.
Image: The Geneva Learning Foundation Collection © 2024
#armedConflict #coping #mentalHealth #MHPSS #psychosocialSupport #Ukraine #war
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The report “Two years on: mental health and psychosocial needs in Ukraine and affected countries” is from the Psychosocial Support Centre, a specialized hub of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) with the mission to “enhance psychosocial support initiatives”.
Key points from the report include:
- Nearly “one in ten of those affected by war grapple with moderate to severe mental health issues.” This refers to the crisis having significant psychological impacts on those directly impacted or displaced by the conflict.
- Over 1 million crisis-affected people have received psychosocial support (PSS) “thanks to specialist staff and more than 124,000 volunteers from 58 countries.”
- There are “increased psychological assistance requests…from women heading households” as Ukraine sees heightened risks to families and disruptions to support services due to the conflict.
- “Three out of four parents report signs of psychological trauma in their children” including impaired memory, inattention, and learning difficulties. Children are especially vulnerable to the stresses and trauma resulting from the conflict.
- Psychological First Aid (PFA) services are provided “at Humanitarian Service Points along refugee routes, through call centers, and at various contact points”.
Overall, the report highlights the substantial scale and complex nature of MHPSS (mental health and psychosocial support) needs driven by the Ukraine conflict as well as the scale and scope of the Red Cross Red Crescent response mobilized so far including through delivery of PFA (Psychological First Aid) and PSS (psychosocial support).
What are the challenges?
The report on mental health and psychosocial needs in Ukraine highlights several key challenges, including:
- The vast scale of needs driven by protracted conflict, with 14.6 million people requiring humanitarian assistance. Meeting mental health demands for crisis-affected populations often exceeds available capacity and resources.
- Ensuring consistent, sustainable care and support with constrained funding and risk of donor fatigue as the crisis persists long-term. Services must have resilience even as attacks continue disrupting infrastructure.
- Reaching vulnerable groups like the elderly and immobile with limited mobility to access care. Specialized outreach and home-based care is essential but demanding to deliver.
- Preventing burnout, fatigue and declining wellbeing among staff and volunteers working under intense pressure in risky environments. Their mental health and capacity is vital but often overlooked.
What can we learn about psychological first aid (PFA) for children from this report?
First, we need to understand the specialized terminology used:
- The term “MHPSS” (mental health and psychosocial support) refers to a continuum of support aimed at protecting and improving people’s mental health and wellbeing during and after crises. The report notes resourcing this immense and growing scale of MHPSS need remains an acute challenge.
- Psychological First Aid (“PFA”) describes a humane, supportive response to a fellow human being who is suffering and who may need support.
- Child Friendly Spaces (CFS) are a key element of the Red Cross Red Crescent psychosocial support response in Ukraine. They are “a service to increase children’s access to safe environments and promote their psychosocial well-being.”
We learn that with support from the IFRC Psychosocial Centre, the Ukrainian Red Cross Society:
- has provided recreational activities to almost 70,000 children in CFS inside Ukraine over the past year;
- trained 319 staff and volunteers in managing CFS;
- runs CFS to help children cope with issues like difficulties meeting new people, separation anxiety, and fear when air raid sirens sound.
The report shares anecdotes from children, such as a child who came to a CFS in Kyiv after fleeing heavy shelling. His social anxiety has improved and he asks his mom if he can skip school to go to CFS activities instead.
More data, supported by analysis on outcomes and effectiveness, could further strengthen the report.
How can peer learning be useful?
A peer learning model focused on improving health outcomes is likely to be relevant in addressing these multilayered challenges. It is specifically designed to foster reflection and unlock intrinsic motivation in practitioners to create change.
- Peer learning methodologies could help meet capacity gaps by scaling support across affected areas rapidly through digital means.
- Peer support networks could enable volunteers and staff caring for others to also care for themselves, preventing fatigue.
- By connecting practitioners across borders and sectors, peer learning could help to share innovative, context-appropriate solutions and accelerate their testing and refinement to meet needs.
Reference: Two years on: mental health and psychosocial needs in Ukraine and affected countries. Psychosocial Support Centre, Copenhagen, Denmark.
Image: Psychosocial Support Centre Report cover.
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#ChildFriendlySpacesCFS_ #children #globalHealth #IFRC #mentalHealth #MHPSS #PsychologicalFirstAidPFA_ #PsychosocialSupportPSS_ #UkraineRedCross
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Cascade training remains widely used in global health.
Cascade training can look great on paper: an expert trains a small group who, in turn, train others, thereby theoretically scaling the knowledge across an organization.
It attempts to combine the advantages of expert coaching and peer learning by passing knowledge down a hierarchy.
However, despite its promise and persistent use, cascade training is plagued by several factors that often lead to its failure.
This is well-documented in the field of learning, but largely unknown (or ignored) in global health.
What are the mechanics of this known inefficacy?
Here are four factors that contribute to the failure of cascade training
1. Information loss
Consider a model where an expert holds a knowledge set K. In each subsequent layer of the cascade, α percentage of the knowledge is lost:
- Where is the knowledge at the nth level of the cascade. As n grows, exponentially decreases, leading to severe information loss.
- Each layer in the cascade introduces a potential for misunderstanding the original information, leading to the training equivalent of the ‘telephone game’.
2. Lack of feedback
In a cascade model, only the first layer receives feedback from an actual expert.
- Subsequent layers have to rely on their immediate ‘trainers,’ who might not have the expertise to correct nuanced mistakes.
- The hierarchical relationship between trainer and trainee is different from peer learning, in which it is assumed that everyone has something to learn from others, and expertise is produced through collaborative learning.
3. Skill variation
- Not everyone is equipped to teach others.
- The people who receive the training first are not necessarily the best at conveying it to the next layer, leading to unequal training quality.
4. Dilution of responsibility
- As the cascade flows down, the sense of responsibility for the quality and fidelity of the training dilutes.
- The absence of feedback to drive a quality development process exacerbates this.
Image: The Geneva Learning Foundation Collection © 2024
https://redasadki.me/2024/02/26/why-does-cascade-training-fail/
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Cascade training remains widely used in global health.
Cascade training can look great on paper: an expert trains a small group who, in turn, train others, thereby theoretically scaling the knowledge across an organization.
It attempts to combine the advantages of expert coaching and peer learning by passing knowledge down a hierarchy.
However, despite its promise and persistent use, cascade training is plagued by several factors that often lead to its failure.
This is well-documented in the field of learning, but largely unknown (or ignored) in global health.
What are the mechanics of this known inefficacy?
Here are four factors that contribute to the failure of cascade training
1. Information loss
Consider a model where an expert holds a knowledge set K. In each subsequent layer of the cascade, α percentage of the knowledge is lost:
- Where is the knowledge at the nth level of the cascade. As n grows, exponentially decreases, leading to severe information loss.
- Each layer in the cascade introduces a potential for misunderstanding the original information, leading to the training equivalent of the ‘telephone game’.
2. Lack of feedback
In a cascade model, only the first layer receives feedback from an actual expert.
- Subsequent layers have to rely on their immediate ‘trainers,’ who might not have the expertise to correct nuanced mistakes.
- The hierarchical relationship between trainer and trainee is different from peer learning, in which it is assumed that everyone has something to learn from others, and expertise is produced through collaborative learning.
3. Skill variation
- Not everyone is equipped to teach others.
- The people who receive the training first are not necessarily the best at conveying it to the next layer, leading to unequal training quality.
4. Dilution of responsibility
- As the cascade flows down, the sense of responsibility for the quality and fidelity of the training dilutes.
- The absence of feedback to drive a quality development process exacerbates this.
Image: The Geneva Learning Foundation Collection © 2024
https://redasadki.me/2024/02/26/why-does-cascade-training-fail/
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Do you work for health? Your are invited to a visual storytelling workshop with health care workers from 44 countries. The Geneva Learning Foundation’s first Fellow of Photography, Chris de Bode, will lead this workshop.
544 health care workers from 44 countries have already confirmed their participation. 80% of participants are sub-national staff working in fragile contexts. Most work for their country’s ministry of health.
Chris deBode spent decades on assignments, traveling around the globe for various NGOs, magazines, and newspapers.
Now, he has partnered with the Geneva Learning Foundation (TGLF) to share his experience with health practitioners who are there every day, as they learn to tell their own visual stories about immunization, the impacts of climate change on health, and other issues that matter for the communities they serve.
“Technical knowledge is not decisive in making your picture”, says Chris. “The person behind the camera makes the difference. You are the source of your image.”
The workshop is reserved for health professionals who contributed photos to the 2022 and 2023 Immunization Agenda 2030 (IA2030) Movement’s International Photo Exhibitions for World Immunization Week. However, it will also be livestreamed for everyone who has not previously been able to participate.
In 2022 and 2023, over 2,000 photos were shared by immunization staff from all over the world.
- Request your invitation for World Immunization Week 2024
- Download the photo book It takes people to make #VaccinesWork
On 18 March 2024, health professionals from the following countries will be participating: Afghanistan, Angola, Bangladesh, Belgium, Benin, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Canada, Central African Republic, Chad, Comoros, Congo, Costa Rica, Côte d’Ivoire, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, France, Gabon, Gambia, Germany, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Haiti, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Lebanon, Lesotho, Liberia, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Niger, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Africa, South Sudan, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Tanzania, Togo, Tunisia, Turkey, Uganda, United States, Zambia, Zimbabwe.
Photo by Chris deBode: Eleven-year-old Wilberforce runs along an unpaved road near his home in Gulu, Northen Uganda where he lives with his parents and 6 siblings. He says: “I want to be the fastest. I want my parents, my school and country to be proud of me. Every day I run. I dream of coming home with the biggest trophy.”
Watch the inauguration of the First International Photography Exhibition for Immunization Agenda 2030
Watch the Special Event: World Immunization Week 2023
Watch the Special Event: World Immunization Week 2022
https://redasadki.me/2024/03/13/visual-storytelling-for-health/
#ChrisDeBode #climateChangeAndHealth #globalHealth #VaccinesWork #WorldImmunizationWeek
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Do you work for health? Your are invited to a visual storytelling workshop with health care workers from 44 countries. The Geneva Learning Foundation’s first Fellow of Photography, Chris de Bode, will lead this workshop.
544 health care workers from 44 countries have already confirmed their participation. 80% of participants are sub-national staff working in fragile contexts. Most work for their country’s ministry of health.
Chris deBode spent decades on assignments, traveling around the globe for various NGOs, magazines, and newspapers.
Now, he has partnered with the Geneva Learning Foundation (TGLF) to share his experience with health practitioners who are there every day, as they learn to tell their own visual stories about immunization, the impacts of climate change on health, and other issues that matter for the communities they serve.
“Technical knowledge is not decisive in making your picture”, says Chris. “The person behind the camera makes the difference. You are the source of your image.”
The workshop is reserved for health professionals who contributed photos to the 2022 and 2023 Immunization Agenda 2030 (IA2030) Movement’s International Photo Exhibitions for World Immunization Week. However, it will also be livestreamed for everyone who has not previously been able to participate.
In 2022 and 2023, over 2,000 photos were shared by immunization staff from all over the world.
- Request your invitation for World Immunization Week 2024
- Download the photo book It takes people to make #VaccinesWork
On 18 March 2024, health professionals from the following countries will be participating: Afghanistan, Angola, Bangladesh, Belgium, Benin, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Canada, Central African Republic, Chad, Comoros, Congo, Costa Rica, Côte d’Ivoire, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, France, Gabon, Gambia, Germany, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Haiti, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Lebanon, Lesotho, Liberia, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Niger, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Africa, South Sudan, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Tanzania, Togo, Tunisia, Turkey, Uganda, United States, Zambia, Zimbabwe.
Photo by Chris deBode: Eleven-year-old Wilberforce runs along an unpaved road near his home in Gulu, Northen Uganda where he lives with his parents and 6 siblings. He says: “I want to be the fastest. I want my parents, my school and country to be proud of me. Every day I run. I dream of coming home with the biggest trophy.”
Watch the inauguration of the First International Photography Exhibition for Immunization Agenda 2030
Watch the Special Event: World Immunization Week 2023
Watch the Special Event: World Immunization Week 2022
https://redasadki.me/2024/03/13/visual-storytelling-for-health/
#ChrisDeBode #climateChangeAndHealth #globalHealth #VaccinesWork #WorldImmunizationWeek
-
Do you work for health? Your are invited to a visual storytelling workshop with health care workers from 44 countries. The Geneva Learning Foundation’s first Fellow of Photography, Chris de Bode, will lead this workshop.
544 health care workers from 44 countries have already confirmed their participation. 80% of participants are sub-national staff working in fragile contexts. Most work for their country’s ministry of health.
Chris deBode spent decades on assignments, traveling around the globe for various NGOs, magazines, and newspapers.
Now, he has partnered with the Geneva Learning Foundation (TGLF) to share his experience with health practitioners who are there every day, as they learn to tell their own visual stories about immunization, the impacts of climate change on health, and other issues that matter for the communities they serve.
“Technical knowledge is not decisive in making your picture”, says Chris. “The person behind the camera makes the difference. You are the source of your image.”
The workshop is reserved for health professionals who contributed photos to the 2022 and 2023 Immunization Agenda 2030 (IA2030) Movement’s International Photo Exhibitions for World Immunization Week. However, it will also be livestreamed for everyone who has not previously been able to participate.
In 2022 and 2023, over 2,000 photos were shared by immunization staff from all over the world.
- Request your invitation for World Immunization Week 2024
- Download the photo book It takes people to make #VaccinesWork
On 18 March 2024, health professionals from the following countries will be participating: Afghanistan, Angola, Bangladesh, Belgium, Benin, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Canada, Central African Republic, Chad, Comoros, Congo, Costa Rica, Côte d’Ivoire, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, France, Gabon, Gambia, Germany, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Haiti, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Lebanon, Lesotho, Liberia, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Niger, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Africa, South Sudan, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Tanzania, Togo, Tunisia, Turkey, Uganda, United States, Zambia, Zimbabwe.
Photo by Chris deBode: Eleven-year-old Wilberforce runs along an unpaved road near his home in Gulu, Northen Uganda where he lives with his parents and 6 siblings. He says: “I want to be the fastest. I want my parents, my school and country to be proud of me. Every day I run. I dream of coming home with the biggest trophy.”
Watch the inauguration of the First International Photography Exhibition for Immunization Agenda 2030
Watch the Special Event: World Immunization Week 2023
Watch the Special Event: World Immunization Week 2022
https://redasadki.me/2024/03/13/visual-storytelling-for-health/
#ChrisDeBode #climateChangeAndHealth #globalHealth #VaccinesWork #WorldImmunizationWeek
-
Do you work for health? Your are invited to a visual storytelling workshop with health care workers from 44 countries. The Geneva Learning Foundation’s first Fellow of Photography, Chris de Bode, will lead this workshop.
544 health care workers from 44 countries have already confirmed their participation. 80% of participants are sub-national staff working in fragile contexts. Most work for their country’s ministry of health.
Chris deBode spent decades on assignments, traveling around the globe for various NGOs, magazines, and newspapers.
Now, he has partnered with the Geneva Learning Foundation (TGLF) to share his experience with health practitioners who are there every day, as they learn to tell their own visual stories about immunization, the impacts of climate change on health, and other issues that matter for the communities they serve.
“Technical knowledge is not decisive in making your picture”, says Chris. “The person behind the camera makes the difference. You are the source of your image.”
The workshop is reserved for health professionals who contributed photos to the 2022 and 2023 Immunization Agenda 2030 (IA2030) Movement’s International Photo Exhibitions for World Immunization Week. However, it will also be livestreamed for everyone who has not previously been able to participate.
In 2022 and 2023, over 2,000 photos were shared by immunization staff from all over the world.
- Request your invitation for World Immunization Week 2024
- Download the photo book It takes people to make #VaccinesWork
On 18 March 2024, health professionals from the following countries will be participating: Afghanistan, Angola, Bangladesh, Belgium, Benin, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Canada, Central African Republic, Chad, Comoros, Congo, Costa Rica, Côte d’Ivoire, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, France, Gabon, Gambia, Germany, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Haiti, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Lebanon, Lesotho, Liberia, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Niger, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Africa, South Sudan, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Tanzania, Togo, Tunisia, Turkey, Uganda, United States, Zambia, Zimbabwe.
Photo by Chris deBode: Eleven-year-old Wilberforce runs along an unpaved road near his home in Gulu, Northen Uganda where he lives with his parents and 6 siblings. He says: “I want to be the fastest. I want my parents, my school and country to be proud of me. Every day I run. I dream of coming home with the biggest trophy.”
Watch the inauguration of the First International Photography Exhibition for Immunization Agenda 2030
Watch the Special Event: World Immunization Week 2023
Watch the Special Event: World Immunization Week 2022
Share this:
https://redasadki.me/2024/03/13/visual-storytelling-for-health/
#ChrisDeBode #climateChangeAndHealth #globalHealth #VaccinesWork #WorldImmunizationWeek
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The Geneva Learning Foundation is pleased to announce the tenth edition of Teach to Reach, to be held 20-21 June 2024.
Teach to Reach is a massive, open peer learning event where health professionals network, and learn with colleagues from all over the world. Request your invitation…
Teach to Reach 10 continues a tradition of groundbreaking peer learning started in 2020, when over 3,000 health workers from 80 countries came together to improve immunization training.
17,662 health professionals – over 80% from districts and facilities, half working for government – participated in Teach to Reach 9 in October 2023. Participants shared 940 experiences ahead of the event. See what we learned at Teach to Reach 9 or view Insights Live with Dr Orin Levine.
Teach to Reach is a platform, community, and network to amplify voices from lower-resource settings bearing the greatest burden of disease.
Teach to Reach 10 will focus on the impacts of climate change on health, following the publication of a ground-breaking report sharing insights of over 1,200 health workers.
In the video below, learn from the experiences of 4,700 participants in our Special Event: From community to planet: Health professionals on the frontlines of climate change.
Poor connectivity? You will find the videos on this page in the low-bandwidth, audio-only Teach to Reach podcast on Apple, Spotify, Google, or Amazon Podcasts.
Alongside this theme, other critical health challenges selected by participants for this tenth edition include immunization, neglected tropical diseases (NTDs), and neglected needs of women’s health.
In this video of a Teach to Reach session, learn about local action led by community-based health workers to tackle Female Genital Schistosomiasis (FGS), a neglected tropical disease that affects an estimated 56 million women and girls.
In the run-up to Teach to Reach 10, participants will share their real-world experience. Every success, lessons learned, and challenge will be shared back with the community and brought to the attention of partners.
The Manifesto for investment in health workers, a visionary statement elaborated by over 1,300 health workers, will be launched at Teach to Reach 10.
A diverse range of over 50 global organizations have partnered with Teach to Reach since 2020, including Gavi the Vaccine Alliance, the Wellcome Trust, and UNICEF.
The next video is a session with UNICEF on reaching zero-dose children in urban settings.
Alongside global partners and ministries of health, local community-based organizations will also be invited to become Teach to Reach partners.
Partners are invited to join the first Partner Briefing on Monday 4 March 2024, bringing together global health organizations with a commitment to listening and learning from health workers and the communities they serve.
Illustration: The Geneva Learning Foundation © 2024
#climateChangeAndHealth #ManifestoForGlobalHealth #peerLearning #TeachToReach
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The Geneva Learning Foundation is pleased to announce the tenth edition of Teach to Reach, to be held 20-21 June 2024.
Teach to Reach is a massive, open peer learning event where health professionals network, and learn with colleagues from all over the world. Request your invitation…
Teach to Reach 10 continues a tradition of groundbreaking peer learning started in 2020, when over 3,000 health workers from 80 countries came together to improve immunization training.
17,662 health professionals – over 80% from districts and facilities, half working for government – participated in Teach to Reach 9 in October 2023. Participants shared 940 experiences ahead of the event. See what we learned at Teach to Reach 9 or view Insights Live with Dr Orin Levine.
Teach to Reach is a platform, community, and network to amplify voices from lower-resource settings bearing the greatest burden of disease.
Teach to Reach 10 will focus on the impacts of climate change on health, following the publication of a ground-breaking report sharing insights of over 1,200 health workers.
In the video below, learn from the experiences of 4,700 participants in our Special Event: From community to planet: Health professionals on the frontlines of climate change.
Poor connectivity? You will find the videos on this page in the low-bandwidth, audio-only Teach to Reach podcast on Apple, Spotify, Google, or Amazon Podcasts.
Alongside this theme, other critical health challenges selected by participants for this tenth edition include immunization, neglected tropical diseases (NTDs), and neglected needs of women’s health.
In this video of a Teach to Reach session, learn about local action led by community-based health workers to tackle Female Genital Schistosomiasis (FGS), a neglected tropical disease that affects an estimated 56 million women and girls.
In the run-up to Teach to Reach 10, participants will share their real-world experience. Every success, lessons learned, and challenge will be shared back with the community and brought to the attention of partners.
The Manifesto for investment in health workers, a visionary statement elaborated by over 1,300 health workers, will be launched at Teach to Reach 10.
A diverse range of over 50 global organizations have partnered with Teach to Reach since 2020, including Gavi the Vaccine Alliance, the Wellcome Trust, and UNICEF.
The next video is a session with UNICEF on reaching zero-dose children in urban settings.
Alongside global partners and ministries of health, local community-based organizations will also be invited to become Teach to Reach partners.
Partners are invited to join the first Partner Briefing on Monday 4 March 2024, bringing together global health organizations with a commitment to listening and learning from health workers and the communities they serve.
Illustration: The Geneva Learning Foundation © 2024
#climateChangeAndHealth #ManifestoForGlobalHealth #peerLearning #TeachToReach
-
The Geneva Learning Foundation is pleased to announce the tenth edition of Teach to Reach, to be held 20-21 June 2024.
Teach to Reach is a massive, open peer learning event where health professionals network, and learn with colleagues from all over the world. Request your invitation…
Teach to Reach 10 continues a tradition of groundbreaking peer learning started in 2020, when over 3,000 health workers from 80 countries came together to improve immunization training.
17,662 health professionals – over 80% from districts and facilities, half working for government – participated in Teach to Reach 9 in October 2023. Participants shared 940 experiences ahead of the event. See what we learned at Teach to Reach 9 or view Insights Live with Dr Orin Levine.
Teach to Reach is a platform, community, and network to amplify voices from lower-resource settings bearing the greatest burden of disease.
Teach to Reach 10 will focus on the impacts of climate change on health, following the publication of a ground-breaking report sharing insights of over 1,200 health workers.
In the video below, learn from the experiences of 4,700 participants in our Special Event: From community to planet: Health professionals on the frontlines of climate change.
Poor connectivity? You will find the videos on this page in the low-bandwidth, audio-only Teach to Reach podcast on Apple, Spotify, Google, or Amazon Podcasts.
Alongside this theme, other critical health challenges selected by participants for this tenth edition include immunization, neglected tropical diseases (NTDs), and neglected needs of women’s health.
In this video of a Teach to Reach session, learn about local action led by community-based health workers to tackle Female Genital Schistosomiasis (FGS), a neglected tropical disease that affects an estimated 56 million women and girls.
In the run-up to Teach to Reach 10, participants will share their real-world experience. Every success, lessons learned, and challenge will be shared back with the community and brought to the attention of partners.
The Manifesto for investment in health workers, a visionary statement elaborated by over 1,300 health workers, will be launched at Teach to Reach 10.
A diverse range of over 50 global organizations have partnered with Teach to Reach since 2020, including Gavi the Vaccine Alliance, the Wellcome Trust, and UNICEF.
The next video is a session with UNICEF on reaching zero-dose children in urban settings.
Alongside global partners and ministries of health, local community-based organizations will also be invited to become Teach to Reach partners.
Partners are invited to join the first Partner Briefing on Monday 4 March 2024, bringing together global health organizations with a commitment to listening and learning from health workers and the communities they serve.
Illustration: The Geneva Learning Foundation © 2024
#climateChangeAndHealth #ManifestoForGlobalHealth #peerLearning #TeachToReach
-
The Geneva Learning Foundation is pleased to announce the tenth edition of Teach to Reach, to be held 20-21 June 2024.
Teach to Reach is a massive, open peer learning event where health professionals network, and learn with colleagues from all over the world. Request your invitation…
Teach to Reach 10 continues a tradition of groundbreaking peer learning started in 2020, when over 3,000 health workers from 80 countries came together to improve immunization training.
17,662 health professionals – over 80% from districts and facilities, half working for government – participated in Teach to Reach 9 in October 2023. Participants shared 940 experiences ahead of the event. See what we learned at Teach to Reach 9 or view Insights Live with Dr Orin Levine.
Teach to Reach is a platform, community, and network to amplify voices from lower-resource settings bearing the greatest burden of disease.
Teach to Reach 10 will focus on the impacts of climate change on health, following the publication of a ground-breaking report sharing insights of over 1,200 health workers.
In the video below, learn from the experiences of 4,700 participants in our Special Event: From community to planet: Health professionals on the frontlines of climate change.
Poor connectivity? You will find the videos on this page in the low-bandwidth, audio-only Teach to Reach podcast on Apple, Spotify, Google, or Amazon Podcasts.
Alongside this theme, other critical health challenges selected by participants for this tenth edition include the Movement for Immunization Agenda 2030 (IA2030), neglected tropical diseases (NTDs), and neglected needs of women’s health.
In this video of a Teach to Reach session, learn about local action led by community-based health workers to tackle Female Genital Schistosomiasis (FGS), a neglected tropical disease that affects an estimated 56 million women and girls.
In the run-up to Teach to Reach 10, participants will share their real-world experience. Every success, lessons learned, and challenge will be shared back with the community and brought to the attention of partners.
The Manifesto for investment in health workers, a visionary statement elaborated by over 1,300 health workers, will be launched at Teach to Reach 10.
A diverse range of over 50 global organizations have partnered with Teach to Reach since 2020, including Gavi the Vaccine Alliance, the Wellcome Trust, and UNICEF.
The next video is a session with UNICEF on reaching zero-dose children in urban settings.
Alongside global partners and ministries of health, local community-based organizations will also be invited to become Teach to Reach partners.
Partners are invited to join the first Partner Briefing on Monday 4 March 2024, bringing together global health organizations with a commitment to listening and learning from health workers and the communities they serve.
Illustration: The Geneva Learning Foundation © 2024
Share this:
#climateChangeAndHealth #ManifestoForGlobalHealth #peerLearning #TeachToReach
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🎭 Oh no, #AI is making fake #poverty #porn now? 🖼️ Quick, someone grab a digital extinguisher! 🚒 Because nothing says "solving global issues" like a committee of moral hand-wringing and LinkedIn posts. 🙄
https://redasadki.me/2025/10/23/how-do-we-stop-ai-generated-poverty-porn-fake-images/ #DigitalEthics #MoralResponsibility #SocialMediaCritique #HackerNews #ngated -
How do we stop AI-generated 'poverty porn' fake images?
https://redasadki.me/2025/10/23/how-do-we-stop-ai-generated-poverty-porn-fake-images/
#HackerNews #AIgeneratedImages #PovertyPorn #DigitalEthics #MediaLiteracy #StopFakeNews