Preferences and skills of Indian public sector teachers

With a sample of 700 future public sector primary teachers in India, a Discrete Choice Experiment is used to measure job preferences, particularly regarding location. General skills are also tested. Urban origin teachers and women are more averse to remote locations than rural origin teachers and men respectively. Women would require a 26-73 percent increase in salary for moving to a remote location. The results suggest that existing caste and gender quotas can be detrimental for hiring skilled teachers willing to work in remote locations. The most preferred location is home, which supports decentralised hiring, although this could compromise skills

Biophysical suitability, economic pressure and land-cover change: a global probabilistic approach and insights for REDD+

There has been a concerted effort by the international scientific community to understand the multiple causes and patterns of land-cover change to support sustainable land management. Here, we examined biophysical suitability, and a novel integrated index of “Economic Pressure on Land” (EPL) to explain land cover in the year 2000, and estimated the likelihood of future land-cover change through 2050, including protected area effectiveness. Biophysical suitability and EPL explained almost half of the global pattern of land cover (R 2 = 0.45), increasing to almost two-thirds in areas where a long-term equilibrium is likely to have been reached (e.g. R 2 = 0.64 in Europe). We identify a high likelihood of future land-cover change in vast areas with relatively lower current and past deforestation (e.g. the Congo Basin). Further, we simulated emissions arising from a “business as usual” and two reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD) scenarios by incorporating data on biomass carbon. As our model incorporates all biome types, it highlights a crucial aspect of the ongoing REDD + debate: if restricted to forests, “cross-biome leakage” would severely reduce REDD + effectiveness for climate change mitigation. If forests were protected from deforestation yet without measures to tackle the drivers of land-cover change, REDD + would only reduce 30 % of total emissions from land-cover change. Fifty-five percent of emissions reductions from forests would be compensated by increased emissions in other biomes. These results suggest that, although REDD + remains a very promising mitigation tool, implementation of complementary measures to reduce land demand is necessary to prevent this leakage

A data support infrastructure for Clean Development Mechanism forestry implementation: an inventory perspective from Cameroon

Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) forestry project development requires highly multi-disciplinary and multiple-source information that can be complex, cumbersome and costly to acquire. Yet developing countries in which CDM projects are created and implemented are often data poor environments and unable to meet such complex information requirements. Using Cameroon as an example, the present paper explores the structure of an enabling host country data support infrastructure for CDM forestry implementation, and also assesses the supply potential of current forestry information. Results include a conceptual data model of CDM project data needs; the list of meso- and macro-level data and information requirements (Demand analysis); and an inventory of relevant data available in Cameroon (Supply analysis). From a comparison of demand and supply, we confirm that data availability and the relevant infrastructure for data or information generation is inadequate for supporting carbon forestry at the micro, meso and macro-levels in Cameroon. The results suggest that current CDM afforestation and reforestation information demands are almost impenetrable for local communities in host countries and pose a number of cross-scale barriers to project adoption. More importantly, we identify proactive regulatory, institutional and capacity building policy strategies for forest data management improvements that could enhance biosphere carbon management uptake in poor countries. CDM forestry information research needs are also highlighted

Microeconomic institutions and personnel economics for health care delivery: a formal exploration of what matters to health workers in Rwanda

Background: Most developing countries face important challenges regarding the quality of health care and there is a growing consensus that health workers play a key role in this process. Our understanding as to what are the key institutional challenges in human resources, and their underlying driving forces, is more limited. A conceptual framework that structures existing insights and provides concrete directions for policy making is also missing. Methods: To gain a bottom up perspective we gather qualitative data through semi-structured interviews with different levels of health workers and users of health services in rural and urban Rwanda. We conducted discussions with 48 health workers and 25 users of health services in nine different groups in 2005. We maximized within-group heterogeneity by selecting participants using specific criteria that affect health worker performance and career choice. The discussion were analysed electronically, to identify key themes and insights, and are documented with a descriptive quantitative analysis relating to the associations between quotations. The findings from this research are then revisited ten years later making use of detailed follow up studies that have been carried out since then. Findings: The original discussions identified both key challenges in human resources for health, and driving forces of these challenges, as well as possible solutions. Two sets of issues were highlighted: those related to the size and distribution of the workforce, and those related to health workers’ on-the-job performance. Among the latter, four categories were identified: health workers’ poor attitudes towards patients, absenteeism, corruption and embezzlement, and lack of medical skills among some categories of health workers. The discussion suggest that four components constitute the deeper causal factors, which are, ranked in order of ease of malleability: incentives, monitoring arrangements, professional and workplace norms and intrinsic motivation. Three institutional innovations are identified that aim at improving performance: performance pay, community health workers and increased attention to training of health workers. Revisiting the findings from this primary research making use of later in depth studies, the analysis demonstrates their continued relevance and usefulness. We discuss how the different factors affect the quality of care by impacting on health worker performance and labour market choices, making use of insights from economics and development studies on the role of institutions. Conclusion: The study results indicates that health care quality to an important degree depends on four institutional factors at the micro level that strongly impact on health workers performance and career choice, and which deserve more attention in applied research and policy reform. The analysis also helps to identify ways forwards, which fit well with the Ministry’s most recent strategic plan

Wrong schools or wrong students? The potential role of medical education in regional imbalances of the health workforce in the United Republic of Tanzania

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The United Republic of Tanzania, like many other countries in sub-Saharan Africa, faces a human resources crisis in its health sector, with a small and inequitably distributed health workforce. Rural areas and other poor regions are characterised by a high burden of disease compared to other regions of the country. At the same time, these areas are poorly supplied with human resources compared to urban areas, a reflection of the situation in the whole of Sub-Saharan Africa, where 1.3% of the world's health workforce shoulders 25% of the world's burden of disease. Medical schools select candidates for training and form these candidates' professional morale. It is therefore likely that medical schools can play an important role in the problem of geographical imbalance of doctors in the United Republic of Tanzania.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>This paper reviews available research evidence that links medical students' characteristics with human resource imbalances and the contribution of medical schools in perpetuating an inequitable distribution of the health workforce.</p> <p>Existing literature on the determinants of the geographical imbalance of clinicians, with a special focus on the role of medical schools, is reviewed. In addition, structured questionnaires collecting data on demographics, rural experience, working preferences and motivational aspects were administered to 130 fifth-year medical students at the medical faculties of MUCHS (University of Dar es Salaam), HKMU (Dar es Salaam) and KCMC (Tumaini University, Moshi campus) in the United Republic of Tanzania. The 130 students represented 95.6% of the Tanzanian finalists in 2005. Finally, we apply probit regressions in STATA to analyse the cross-sectional data coming from the aforementioned survey.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The lack of a primary interest in medicine among medical school entrants, biases in recruitment, the absence of rural related clinical curricula in medical schools, and a preference for specialisation not available in rural areas are among the main obstacles for building a motivated health workforce which can help correct the inequitable distribution of doctors in the United Republic of Tanzania.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>This study suggests that there is a need to re-examine medical school admission policies and practices.</p

Local biodiversity is higher inside than outside terrestrial protected areas worldwide

Protected areas are widely considered essential for biodiversity conservation. However, few global studies have demonstrated that protection benefits a broad range of species. Using a new global biodiversity database with unprecedented geographic and taxonomic coverage, we compare four biodiversity measures at sites sampled in multiple land uses inside and outside protected areas. Globally, species richness is 10.7% higher and abundance 14.5% higher in samples taken inside protected areas compared to samples taken outside, but neither rarefaction-based richness nor endemicity differ significantly. Importantly, we show that the positive effects of protection are mostly attributable to differences in land use between protected and unprotected sites. Nonetheless, even within some human-dominated land uses, species richness and abundance are higher in protected sites. Our results reinforce the global importance of protected areas but suggest that protection does not consistently benefit species with small ranges or increase the variety of ecological niches

Roadless wilderness area determines forest elephant movements in the Congo Basin

A dramatic expansion of road building is underway in the Congo Basin fuelled by private enterprise, international aid, and government aspirations. Among the great wilderness areas on earth, the Congo Basin is outstanding for its high biodiversity, particularly mobile megafauna including forest elephants (Loxodonta africana cyclotis). The abundance of many mammal species in the Basin increases with distance from roads due to hunting pressure, but the impacts of road proliferation on the movements of individuals are unknown. We investigated the ranging behaviour of forest elephants in relation to roads and roadless wilderness by fitting GPS telemetry collars onto a sample of 28 forest elephants living in six priority conservation areas. We show that the size of roadless wilderness is a strong determinant of home range size in this species. Though our study sites included the largest wilderness areas in central African forests, none of 4 home range metrics we calculated, including core area, tended toward an asymptote with increasing wilderness size, suggesting that uninhibited ranging in forest elephants no longer exists. Furthermore we show that roads outside protected areas which are not protected from hunting are a formidable barrier to movement while roads inside protected areas are not. Only 1 elephant from our sample crossed an unprotected road. During crossings her mean speed increased 14-fold compared to normal movements. Forest elephants are increasingly confined and constrained by roads across the Congo Basin which is reducing effective habitat availability and isolating populations, significantly threatening long term conservation efforts. If the current road development trajectory continues, forest wildernesses and the forest elephants they contain will collapse

Avoiding Costly Conservation Mistakes: The Importance of Defining Actions and Costs in Spatial Priority Setting

Background: The typical mandate in conservation planning is to identify areas that represent biodiversity targets within the smallest possible area of land or sea, despite the fact that area may be a poor surrogate for the cost of many conservation actions. It is also common for priorities for conservation investment to be identified without regard to the particular conservation action that will be implemented. This demonstrates inadequate problem specification and may lead to inefficiency: the cost of alternative conservation actions can differ throughout a landscape, and may result in dissimilar conservation priorities