Boosting the Immunization Workforce: Lessons from the Merck Vaccine Network - Africa

This report shares lessons learned from The Merck Company Foundation's decade of experience building immunization capacity in Africa. The Merck Vaccine Network -- Africa, a philanthropic initiative to train immunization managers in Kenya, Mali, Uganda, and Zambia, suggests seven key lessons that can help other funders, governments, and NGOs designing or implementing similar vaccine delivery training programs improve the effectiveness and sustainability of their work.Merck's experience designing and supporting the initiative can offer valuable lessons for other actors in the immunization and broader global health fields who are engaged in or planning similar work. Specifically, we identify seven forward-looking lessons that can increase the effectiveness and sustainability of programs to build the capacity of the vaccine workforce in developing countries:Conduct a rigorous needs assessment to anchor efforts in local needs and priorities;Perform ongoing monitoring and evaluation (M&E) to enable programs to adapt, improve, and generate evidence of impact to attract new partners and funding;Create a sustainability plan at the outset to ensure that program impact is maintained beyond the conclusion of initial funding;Embed programs into local health systems to ensure that investments leverage existing infrastructure, relationships, and resources, and that impact can be sustained beyond the life of the program;Employ locally-adapted curricula and appropriate teaching techniques to maximize transfer and retention of relevant knowledge;Incorporate supportive supervision into programs to ensure that transferred knowledge is maintained and acted upon;Facilitate and support regular convening and communication, enabling continuous learning for improvement.In addition to describing the approach taken by MVN-A and the results achieved in the four focus countries, this paper provides additional detail on each lesson, supported by case studies from the MVNA experience

Anti-Corruption as Strategic CSR: A Call to Action for Corporations

Corruption is not a peripheral social concern that corporations can ignore or passively address -- it is a bottom-line issue that directly affects companies' ability to compete. Widespread in emerging markets, corruption is becoming an increasingly important issue for business to address. Furthermore, it inflicts enduring harm on disadvantaged populations by diverting resources for critical services like education, clean water and health care into the pockets of dishonest public officials. This white paper presents a critical assessment of corporate anti-corruption efforts in the developing world and offers a guide for corporations to move beyond traditional ethics and compliance activities to strategic anti-corruption efforts. Sponsored by The Merck Company Foundation and developed in collaboration with the Ethics Resource Center, the paper reveals opportunities for corporations to engage in more comprehensive and effective anti-corruption reform as a business imperative

Saying goodbye to Friends: Situation comedy as lived experience

The series finale for NBC’s sitcom Friends was a media event, a two-hour broadcast promoted for months, and immediately followed by cast appearances on late night comedy shows and the next morning’s news shows. The show’s popularity demonstrated by fan response to the last episode positions the online and broadcast media discourse surrounding the finale as a rich cultural text for examining the influence of the modern sitcom on fans’ cultural identities and social communities. The Friends broadcast finale taken together with the online discussion of the show creates a site for the production and consumption of fan culture in three ways. First, the self-referential series finale was a significant media event, which framed the finale as part of fans’ real life experience. Second, fan accoutrement articulates a sense of place that is not just projected into viewers’ living rooms, but into their broader lives. Third, the show’s fictional characters, are portrayed as real friends, and become important personae in fans’ social discourse. The Friends finale is fan text, one that conflates the distinction between real life and the small screen in ways that have implications for broader television criticism

Egyenlő bánásmód és esélyegyenlőség a foglalkoztatáspolitikában

Az elektronikus kiadvány a TÁMOP‐5.4.4‐09/1/C‐2009‐0001 „Képzésfejlesztés az összetart(oz)ásért” projekt keretében készült

Cultural distance, mindfulness and passive xenophobia: Using Integrated Threat Theory to explore home higher education students' perspectives on 'internationalisation at home'

This paper addresses the question of interaction between home and international students using qualitative data from 100 home students at two 'teaching intensive' universities in the southwest of England. Stephan and Stephan's Integrated Threat Theory is used to analyse the data, finding evidence for all four types of threat that they predict when outgroups interact. It is found that home students perceive threats to their academic success and group identity from the presence of international students on the campus and in the classroom. These are linked to anxieties around 'mindful' forms of interaction and a taboo around the discussion of difference, leading to a 'passive xenophobia' for the majority. The paper concludes that Integrated Threat Theory is a useful tool in critiquing the 'internationalisation at home' agenda, making suggestions for policies and practices that may alleviate perceived threats, thereby improving the quality and outcomes of intercultural interaction. © 2010 British Educational Research Association

Spectacular horizons: the birth of science fiction film, television, and radio, 1900-1959

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Aficionados, academics, and Danzón expertise: exploring hierarchies in popular music knowledge production

Amateur scholars, such as aficionados, fans, intellectuals, are rarely valued in the twenty-first-century academy, despite their often-encyclopedic knowledge. In this paper, I focus on Mexican aficionados of the popular Cuban music danzón to explore how these mostly older men manage social contexts where they are often marginalized. Drawing on Bourdieu, I examine how danzón aficionados negotiate their field of expertise by employing overlapping strategies: accumulating myriad "facts" and "truths", creating the possibility of ignorance in others, and competing for hegemonic masculine capital. I analyze danzón aficionados' relationships with musicians and dancers, consider power dynamics between these aficionados and academics, and draw on Léon and Romero to discuss relationships between regional and hegemonic scholarship more broadly. I argue that beyond reflexivity and criticism, collective activism is required to reconfigure value systems and symbolic economies, and to fight institutional pressures to reproduce existing power structure

Narrative approach to understand people's comprehension of acquaintance rape: The role of Sex Role Stereotyping

One of the most unreported crimes is acquaintance rape. This may be the result of people's understanding of what rape is because of their rape script and their stereotypes of victim characteristics. These judgements may be moderated by sex role stereotyping (SRS). We utilised a narrative approach to understand low and high SRS participants' rape scripts. Young-adult participants described what they believed a typical rape was, followed by describing an acquaintance rape and then what they believed the stereotypical victim of each crime would be. A narrative analysis was conducted on the data. We found that the blitz script is still held by 44% of low SRS and 47% of high SRS people despite 90% of rapes being committed by an acquaintance. While acquaintance rape scripts existed, the emotional imagery and content of these depended on participants level of SRS. Stereotypical victim characteristics also depended on SRS: those with high SRS were more likely to endorse rape myth ideals in describing victims than those with low SRS. These results have implications for educating people about what rape is so that victims might feel more confident in reporting rape