Blogs
The HEART blog features views from the HEART team and guests on the latest issues in health, education, nutrition, social protection and water & sanitation.
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On 18th March, what must have qualified as the hottest and most humid day ever in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, I braved the heat and clogged rapid bus transit lanes of the city centre to cycle over and attend the launch of ShuleDirect, one of the exciting, technology-enabled initiatives to support and promote student learning… Read more
E-Health or the use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) for health is increasingly being adopted in Kenya to bridge the gap in access to health services, and improve efficiency and governance of the health system in an effort to achieve better health outcomes. In Kenya, a mobile technology revolution is evolving with mobile coverage… Read more
The Ugandan Government has been recognised for adopting policies that have promoted a universal gender mainstreaming agenda. Uganda has been a relatively stable country for the last 30 years though its Northern region sustained a confined 20-year civil war. In the post-conflict setting, there is a convergence of this gender mainstreaming agenda with other dynamics… Read more
Everyone who was at the Durban AIDS conference in 2000 remembers the moment we learnt of effective medications for HIV. Some of us were too scared to believe it. But it turned out to be true and what unfolded was relatively straightforward. Life rapidly changed for people with the virus who were able access treatment…. Read more
Fatima[1] wears a yellow headscarf. She has bright eyes and a hopeful face. She is 17, has already been married for several years, had a child who died in infancy and has been divorced by her husband. She asks us if we are from India as she loves Bollywood films and wants to go to Mumbai…. Read more
So, Early Child Development (ECD) is finally on the global policy agenda. A small group of prominent ECD advocates worked tirelessly to secure the wording of Target 4.2 of the Sustainable Development Goals which states that by 2030 countries should: ‘ensure that all girls and boys have access to quality early childhood development, care and… Read more
Evidence suggests that the provision and access to skills is unequal across different contexts. Marginalised groups are less likely to be able to access skills. Also, gender stereotypes may limit access to skills development, with women and girls being worst affected. Globally, 3 billion people are under 25 years of age, with almost 90 per… Read more
The move into the sustainable development era in 2015 with the agreement of global goals has in tandem also seen growing academic interest and practitioner action research into the concept of flexible and adaptive programming. The ODIs Adapting development: improving services to the poor clearly makes the case that ‘more of the same’ will not… Read more
The recent Ebola death in Sierra Leone takes the official death toll from the epidemic up to 11,316, though this is likely an underestimation. The news comes just days after, on the 14th January 2016, the Ebola crisis in West Africa was declared to be over. Over the past 22 months Ebola has taken the… Read more
While gender and ethics are taken into account as cross-cutting issues in many international development programmes, to date there has been very limited attention to gender in health systems. Often there is no disaggregation of data by sex and many terms such as community health workers and village health committees are gender neutral, when the… Read more
The UK Government has released a new aid strategy. That is, a government-wide strategy for aid, not a DFID strategy. The potential advantages and disadvantages of this have been raised elsewhere, as has the stress on “the national interest” throughout the document. However, here the focus is on what it means for a UK approach to… Read more