Safeguarding from Scrutiny: Toward a Critical Consciousness of Organizational Culture in Humanitarian NGOs

Humanitarian nongovernmental organizations (HNGOs) face a moment of reckoning brought on by decades of operational complexity and conceptual tensions between self-espoused values and external pressures as social change movements like #MeToo and Black Lives Matter demand organizational accountability. Humanitarian aid is being questioned systematically as most HNGOs continue reconciling with their colonialist origin stories from the Global North. Alongside a shrinking British foreign aid budget, and mounting pressures for proving value for money, HNGOs face a record number of natural disasters, energy crises, armed conflicts, and other major emergencies to respond to across the globe. As the British aid sector continues to deal with the policy aftermath of the Oxfam abuse scandal from the 2010 Haiti earthquake, growing calls for new safeguarding measures have resulted in unresolved implications around organizational culture. This dissertation shows that the sector has delivered a largely technocratic response, with new policies, procedures, and management positions while trying to meet the competing demands of British aid actors. As public accounts of wrongdoing continue, these calls for sectoral change involve far-reaching goals but reinforce the lack of clear consciousness around the complex cultures surrounding these global giants of aid distribution. A more comprehensive understanding of the unconscious dynamics of power at play is critical for these accountability actors to achieve effectiveness across the institutional landscape of humanitarianism. This qualitative dissertation utilized Cameron and Quinn’s Competing Values Framework (CVF) as the theoretical foundation for document analysis involving the Charity Commission and Parliament, with their institutional responses to the Oxfam scandal. After analyzing after-action inquiry reports and Parliamentary proceeding transcripts, the key findings center on (1) an overreliance on hierarchical ideas of organizational culture and (2) a lack of sufficient cultural consciousness around HNGOs on the part of actors responsible for their oversight and regulation. The dissertation builds on the CVF by proposing a new four-phase developmental model for greater cultural consciousness in HNGOs: (1) organizations have cultures, (2) organizations are cultures, (3) culture makes sense of reality, and (4) culture is reality. Policy recommendations for organizational development including humanitarian safeguarding efforts, charity oversight and regulation are proposed for implementation across the sector

The Right to Learn: Community Participation in Improving Learning

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the Education for All (EFA) goals have been the catalyst for progress in ensuring access to education. Since governments first endorsed these goals in 2000, around 45 million children who previously did not have access to education have enrolled in primary school and gender parity in primary education has improved significantly. With 2015 deadlines fast approaching, the world must now assess the considerable work that remains to be done and negotiate an ambitious yet achievable successor framework.It is now widely recognized that we are facing a global crisis in learning. 250 million children -- or a staggering 40 percent of the world's primary school age children -- are unable to read, write, or demonstrate basic numeracy by fourth grade.2 It is the poorest, most marginalized children, including those living in areas affected by conflict, who are most at risk of being out of school or being in school but learning very little. As we draw closer to the MDGs deadline, there is growing consensus amongst UN-led thematic, country and global consultations that the focus must move from enrolment to learning. Today, the conversation is not just about whether a child gets a seat in the classroom, it's about what they learn when they get there -- as well as before they arrive and after they leave. For that reason, an equitable learning agenda must be central to the post-2015 development framework. This should extend beyond a narrow focus on inputs, such as the need for books and teacher training, to include processes for stimulating learning, measuring learning outcomes, and bolstering accountability to local stakeholders

Spectromètres Ge(Li) 0 absorption totale

On a réalisé divers spectromètres Ge(Li) à absorption totale constitués par deux diodes fonctionnant en coïncidence-somme, ainsi qu'un détecteur puits de 52 cm3

Process-oriented analysis for medical devices

Medical Cyber Physical Systems are widely used in modern healthcare environments. Such systems are considered life-critical due to the severity of consequences that faults may cause. Effective methods, techniques and tools for modeling and analyzing medical critical systems are of major importance for ensuring system reliability and patient safety. This work is looking at issues concerning different types of medical industry needs including safety analysis, testing, conformance checking, performance analysis and optimization. We explore the possibility of addressing these issues by exploiting information recorded in logs generated by medical devices during execution. Process-oriented analysis of logs is known as process mining, a novel field that has gained considerable interest in several contexts in the last decade. Process mining techniques will be applied to an industrial use case provided by Fresenius, a manufacturer of medical devices, for analyzing process logs generated by an infusion pump.Postprint (published version

Evidence for the coexistence of Dirac and massive carriers in a-(BEDT-TTF)2I3 under hydrostatic pressure

Transport measurements were performed on the organic layered compound \aI3 under hydrostatic pressure. The carrier types, densities and mobilities are determined from the magneto-conductance of \aI3 . While evidence of high-mobility massless Dirac carriers has already been given, we report here, their coexistence with low-mobility massive holes. This coexistence seems robust as it has been found up to the highest studied pressure. Our results are in agreement with recent DFT calculations of the band structure of this system under hydrostatic pressure. A comparison with graphene Dirac carriers has also been done.Comment: 5 pages 5 figure