Community Participation in Local Governments: Public Consulting and Transparency in Gaza Strip, Palestine

The objectives of this study are to identify and examine the community participation strategies concerning consultation and information disclosure and to identify and evaluate major barriers to community participation development. A questionnaire survey was developed to elicit the perceptions of the municipality’s officials (top management and/or mayors of the selected sample) of Gaza Strip municipalities regarding community participation practice. The results indicated that there is a weak transparency (information disclosure) and community consultation in the municipalities of Gaza Strip. The findings revealed that, the major barriers of information disclosure approach are due to legal challenges, public awareness, lack of community members’ skills and knowledge and social factors. In addition, the major barriers of community consultation are mainly due to lack of community members’ skills and knowledge, lack of social capital and trust of local people in their leaders, political, economic challenges, community culture and municipality council awareness. It is recommended to expand the scope of public participation and developing strategies that maximize citizen input in community development activities in local governments of Gaza Strip. The findings can assist in identifying new directions for enhancing public participation in Gaza Strip local government

Challenges to Community Participation in Gaza Strip Municipalities

Community participation in municipalities' decisions and long planning processes ensures their full engagement in determining their own developmental needs. Therefore, identifying the challenges for community participation is considered as a crucial aspect for successful governance and service delivery in the local municipalities of governments. The aim of this paper is to identify and assess the challenges to community participation in Gaza Strip municipalities in Palestine. Ten groups of challenges, which comprise 44 factors for community participation in Gaza Strip municipalities were identified from the literature review and modified according to the pilot study. A structured questionnaire survey was employed in this study. Relative Importance Index (RII) was used to determine the ranks of the main groups of challenges and its corresponding factors, followed by a parametric test that is analysis of variance (One-Way ANOVA) to test five developed hypotheses. The findings of this paper revealed that shortage of skills was the most significant challenge group to community participation.. The second most significant challenge group was the financial challenges. The third significant group of challenges to community participation was lack of interest and support due to limited support from city council and lack of transparency. The findings revealed agreement among all participants in the most significant challenges for community participation, with one exceptional, where there was disagreement on the rating the main groups of the challenges in terms of the population categories

Breast-cancer detection using blood-based infrared molecular fingerprints

BACKGROUND Breast cancer screening is currently predominantly based on mammography, tainted with the occurrence of both false positivity and false negativity, urging for innovative strategies, as effective detection of early-stage breast cancer bears the potential to reduce mortality. Here we report the results of a prospective pilot study on breast cancer detection using blood plasma analyzed by Fourier-transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy - a rapid, cost-effective technique with minimal sample volume requirements and potential to aid biomedical diagnostics. FTIR has the capacity to probe health phenotypes via the investigation of the full repertoire of molecular species within a sample at once, within a single measurement in a high-throughput manner. In this study, we take advantage of cross-molecular fingerprinting to probe for breast cancer detection. METHODS We compare two groups: 26 patients diagnosed with breast cancer to a same-sized group of age-matched healthy, asymptomatic female participants. Training with support-vector machines (SVM), we derive classification models that we test in a repeated 10-fold cross-validation over 10 times. In addition, we investigate spectral information responsible for BC identification using statistical significance testing. RESULTS Our models to detect breast cancer achieve an average overall performance of 0.79 in terms of area under the curve (AUC) of the receiver operating characteristic (ROC). In addition, we uncover a relationship between the effect size of the measured infrared fingerprints and the tumor progression. CONCLUSION This pilot study provides the foundation for further extending and evaluating blood-based infrared probing approach as a possible cross-molecular fingerprinting modality to tackle breast cancer detection and thus possibly contribute to the future of cancer screening

Exposure assessment of radon in the drinking water supplies: a descriptive study in Palestine

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Radon gas is considered as a main risk factor for lung cancer and found naturally in rock, soil, and water. The objective of this study was to determine the radon level in the drinking water sources in Nablus city in order to set up a sound policy on water management in Palestine.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>This was a descriptive study carried out in two phases with a random sampling technique in the second phase. Primarily, samples were taken from 4 wells and 5 springs that supplied Nablus city residents. For each source, 3 samples were taken and each was analyzed in 4 cycles by RAD 7 device manufactured by Durridge Company. Secondly, from the seven regions of the Nablus city, three samples were taken from the residential tap water of each region. Regarding the old city, ten samples were taken. Finally, the mean radon concentration value for each source was calculated.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The mean (range) concentration of radon in the main sources were 6.9 (1.5-23.4) Becquerel/liter (Bq/L). Separately, springs and wells' means were 4.6 Bq/L and 9.5 Bq/L; respectively. For the residential tap water in the 7 regions, the results of the mean (range) concentration values were found to be 1.0 (0.9-1.3) Bq/L. For the old city, the mean (range) concentration values were 2.3 (0.9-3.9) Bq/L.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Except for Al-Badan well, radon concentrations in the wells and springs were below the United State Environmental Protection Agency maximum contaminated level (U.S EPA MCL). The level was much lower for tap water. Although the concentration of radon in the tap water of old city were below the MCL, it was higher than other regions in the city. Preventive measures and population awareness on radon's exposure are recommended.</p

المشاركة المجتمعية في عمليات التخطيط و الموازنة للبلديات في قطاع غزة

This study aimed to pinpoint the role of community participation in the planning and budgeting processes in the Gaza Strip municipalities; in addition, this study provided research and analysis for the community participation strategies and discussed its importance. As well as, the research focused on the local councils and local communities attitudes toward the participatory process, and all the benefits and challenges experienced from involving the community in the municipal works. This study also aimed to provide the Palestinian government officials and municipalities with accurate and comprehensive information about participatory planning and budgeting. The followed methodology in this research study was through conducting questionnaire survey. Likert type scale was employed in order to gather perceptions about the research objectives. Since the research was carried out in Gaza Strip seeking the local governments and the local community; neighborhood committees and NGO's, the stratified sampling method was used for determining the simple size for each group. The study findings showed that, for both the planning and budgeting processes, information disclosure strategies were the most practiced strategies, specifically, setting a system to receive citizen's inquiries or appeals, and using news media and publications for disclosing information about municipal plans, budgets and projects, while neighborhood committees, workshops, open meetings were the most used strategies in consulting the local community. Other strategies, shared decision making strategies, public empowerment strategies, were rarely used. The study also revealed that, overall, news media, internet applications, institutional reports, working groups, workshops, focus groups were the most important strategies for the participatory planning process, and workshops, joint committees, neighborhood committees, advisory committees, news media, specialized seminar, and working groups for the participatory budgeting process. The study results also indicated a positive attitude among members of the study sample toward community participation in the municipal planning and budgeting processes. In addition, the results showed that community participation benefits accounted for moderate to low influence in the Gaza Strip municipalities and communities. The most achieved benefits from practicing community participation in the municipal processes were improving decision making process, improving social accountability and responsibility, and creating links between communities and municipalities. Other participation benefits were very weak, which included improving services, gaining economic benefits, achieving benefits to vulnerable groups. The study indicated that shortage of skills was the most significant challenge to community participation, followed by financial challenges, considerable lack of interest and support. The cultural, political and timing challenges were found the least challenges of community participation process. The study findings also showed that capacity building were the top measure for supporting community participation approach and overcoming its local challenges followed by updating public engagement mechanisms and forming community groups to pressure decision making process, activating the election system for LGs councilors, and initiating a separate division inside the municipality to follow up the participatory process. Finally, the study set recommendations for each objective of the study, recommendations included prompting some strategies that were found to be effective by this study e.g. (1) news media, publications, internet applications for information disclosure, (2) workshops, focus groups, beneficiary assessments, open meetings, and neighborhood committees for public consulting, (3) Task forces or working groups, joint committees, and neighborhood committees for making shared decisions, (4) Civil society grants and voluntarism for public empowerment in the planning process. Moreover, due to the weak benefits gained from practiced community participation, it was recommended that the participatory approach should be evaluated according to the benefits achieved, and each benefit found to be ineffective by this study should get a great attention by the city councils. The most important recommendation for the community participation challenges was that trainings for councilors, ward committee members, and the community, should be held and practically focusing on the participation strategies in municipal planning and budgeting processes. Finally the best measures for overcoming those challenges investigated by this study were strongly recommended