Blogs
The HEART blog features views from the HEART team and guests on the latest issues in health, education and nutrition.
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On 18 and 19 March 2017, together with around 1,500 people from around the world, I attended the Global Education and Skills Forum in Dubai. The Forum provided an exciting platform to celebrate the importance of teachers around the world. Organised by the Varkey Foundation, it was also a stark reminder of the difficulties that… Read more
On Human Rights Day, Ruth Naylor, co-author of our HEART topic guide on education for refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) in low- and middle-income countries, highlights the data gaps and challenges to addressing educational needs for this largely invisible group. Education is a fundamental human right. Legally, every individual across the world is… Read more
In order to translate global commitments of ensuring access to sexual and reproductive healthcare services for every woman and every girl into practical, affordable and sustainable interventions, policy makers and implementers need to be able to draw on solid evidence of what does and does not work. The More Mobilising Access to Maternal Health Services… Read more
Joseph Munyambanza, a refugee from the DRC, started teaching fellow refugees in Uganda in his early teens, whilst studying at secondary school. In his keynote speech in Berlin, at “Education for a better future – creating prospects for displaced populations”, he described how he had joined with other refugee youth in his camp to form… Read more
This blog is written by Jo Boyden, Director of the Young Lives programme, following her speech at a forum hosted by CIFAR, the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, on November 17, 2016. The multi-sectoral forum on the well-being of the world’s children is aimed at bringing researchers, practitioners and policy makers to the table to share… Read more
The Global Goals have set targets for ‘quality education’ on the one hand, and for measurement and monitoring on the other hand. Teachers, teacher training, and what happens inside classrooms, are likely to be the topic of research in the coming years. This blog has been driven by our sense of injustice that teachers seem… Read more
Information about school performance can be powerful. Governments can use it to drive an accountability system, and schools can use data to identify areas for self-improvement. However, to be useful, the data need to provide fair and accurate information about school quality. In the UK, Ark’s chain of academy schools is at the forefront of… Read more
Given that 45 per cent of child deaths (that’s nearly half) are because of undernutriton, tackling it should be the highest of priorities for our decision makers. It is also very relevant to note, that a majority of those deaths are amongst the most vulnerable and poorest communities. With this in mind, as most people,… Read more
Access to menstrual hygiene products is a major challenge facing women and girls in developing countries and is an aspect of water, sanitation and hygiene that is often overlooked (Crofts et al., 2012). Lack of access to menstrual hygiene products can often mean that women and girls have considerable difficulty in going about their lives… Read more
Late in 2015 I jointly posted with Dr. Abhijeet Singh of the Young Lives team in Oxford: Getting learning assessments right when money depends on it about a novel, national scale experiment that directly links financial aid for education to improvements in student learning outcomes. We outlined some of the risks, both statistical and political,… Read more
There are dramatic differences in mortality and life expectancy between and within countries. Disadvantaged groups have poorer survival chances and use facility-based services less than other groups. Community health services are an opportunity to improve this situation and create a pathway to Universal Health Coverage (UHC). Community Health Workers (CHWs) can improve equitable child survival,… Read more