Working with communities to increase the use of health services: an experience from Togo, West Africa

A project in Togo, West Africa, demonstrated that motivated and skilled district health teams can increase community involvement in promoting positive health behavior. Village health committees, village volunteers, health workers, itinerant health agents, and school teachers collaborated with district health personnel in village-wide efforts to increase the use of health services targeted to children under 5 years of age. The project also demonstrated that in areas where health services are accessible, high levels of service utilization can be achieved by villages through a combination of strategies that rely on person-to-person and group methods of communication. Village-level educational programs, which included theater, storytelling, patient education at health facilities, and child-to-child activities in schools contributed to improvements in immunization coverage levels in children 12-23 months of age after less than one year following the educational intervention. The major factors responsible for the success of the project are summarized,and issues related to project replication and diffusion are discussed."Health Education"--cover.Bibliography: p. 15-16

Controlling malaria in Francophone Africa: taking the initiative : a series of papers on the ACSI-CCCD Malaria Initiative

edited by Joseph F. Naimoli and Phuc Nguyen-Dinh."Malaria"--cover.Includes bibliographic references.United States Agency for International Development, Africa Regional Project 698-042

The global pendulum swing towards community health workers in low- and middle-income countries: A scoping review of trends, geographical distribution and programmatic orientations, 2005 to 2014

BACKGROUND: There has been a substantial increase in publications and interest in community health workers (CHWs) in low- and middle-income countries (LMIC) over the last years. This paper examines the growth, geographical distribution and programmatic orientations of the indexed literature on CHWs in LMIC over a 10-year period. METHODS: A scoping review of publications on CHWs from 2005 to 2014 was conducted. Using an inclusive list of terms, we searched seven databases (including MEDLINE, CINAHL, Cochrane) for all English-language publications on CHWs in LMIC. Two authors independently screened titles/abstracts, downloading full-text publications meeting inclusion criteria. These were coded in an Excel spreadsheet by year, type of publication (e.g. review, empirical), country, region, programmatic orientation (e.g. maternal-child health, HIV/AIDS, comprehensive) and CHW roles (e.g. prevention, treatment) and further analysed in Stata14. Drawing principally on the subset of review articles, specific roles within programme areas were identified and grouped. FINDINGS: Six hundred seventy-eight publications from 46 countries on CHWs were inventoried over the 10-year period. There was a sevenfold increase in annual number of publications from 23 in 2005 to 156 in 2014. Half the publications were reporting on initiatives in Africa, a third from Asia and 11 % from the Americas (mostly Brazil). The largest single focus and driver of the growth in publications was on CHW roles in meeting the Millennium Development Goals of maternal, child and neonatal survival (35 % of total), followed by HIV/AIDS (16 %), reproductive health (6 %), non-communicable diseases (4 %) and mental health (4 %). Only 17 % of the publications approached CHW roles in an integrated fashion. There were also distinct regional (and sometimes country) profiles, reflecting different histories and programme traditions. CONCLUSIONS: The growth in literature on CHWs provides empirical evidence of ever-increasing expectations for addressing health burdens through community-based action. This literature has a strong disease- or programme-specific orientation, raising important questions for the design and sustainable delivery of integrated national programmes.Scopu

A Component Multiplicative Error Model for Realized Volatility Measures

We propose a component Multiplicative Error Model (MEM) for modelling and forecasting realized volatility measures. In contrast to conventional MEMs, the proposed specification resorts to the use of a multiplicative component structure in order to parsimoniously parameterize the complex dependence structure of realized volatility measures. The long-run component is defined as a linear combination of MIDAS filters moving at different frequencies, while the short-run component is constrained to follow a unit mean GARCH recursion. This particular specification of the long-run component allows to reproduce very persistent oscillations of the conditional mean of the volatility process, in the spirit of Corsi's Heterogeneous Autoregressive Model (HAR). The empirical performances of the proposed model are assessed by means of an application to the realized volatility of the S&P 500 index