United Nations Sustainable Development Goals: Promoting health and well-being through physical education partnerships

The United Nations recently approved the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which forms a guideline policy for all nations. While the UN have strongly advised that partnerships are essential for the implementation of these global goals, within local communities there is little evidence of how this is best done or what it looks like in practice. This paper shares a health and wellbeing community initiative that achieves goals three and four of the SDGs, and in doing so models how to implement physical education partnerships as advocated by the UN. The highly successful innovative initiative is “Best Start: A community collaborative approach to lifelong health and wellness” (2011–2014).This paper shares a health and wellbeing partnership, modelling implementation of physical education (PE) advocated by the United Nations (UN). The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) exemplifies global efforts towards equality, specifically Goal 3 and 4 address health and wellbeing. The purpose of this paper is to provide insights into cross sector “partnerships”, identified as essential for the implementation of the SDGs. This is significant as the UN acknowledge a present gap of information on partnerships in action and a need for reporting from the ground level. The project “Best Start: A community collaborative approach to lifelong health and wellness”, began as a partnership between a university and nearby schools and quickly grew to involve Australian Registered Training Organisations, the local health industry, Education departments and sport governing bodies. The collaborations involved pre-service teachers teaching Health and PE lessons to children in a disadvantaged socio-economic area, creating valuable learning experiences for stakeholders. Local and global communities were involved in research and reform. The project creatively optimised resources available through state, Australian and international connections. International partnerships enabled identification of unique contextual opportunities. Programme planning was strengthened with data gathered from an England and Wales Ofsted awarded Primary Physical Education course. Various methods, including; semi-structured interviews, reflective journal, observations, document analysis, and Student Evaluation of Teaching Units (SETU) were adopted. SETU is valid and reliable data collected by the university for the purposes of research. The findings support that partnerships enable SDG implementation and the research paper offers direction for localisation

Violent Conflicts and Civil Strife in West Africa:Causes, Challenges and Prospects

The advent of intra-state conflicts or ‘new wars’ in West Africa has brought many of its economies to the brink of collapse, creating humanitarian casualties and concerns. For decades, countries such as Liberia, Sierra Leone, Côte d’Ivoire and Guinea- Bissau were crippled by conflicts and civil strife in which violence and incessant killings were prevalent. While violent conflicts are declining in the sub-region, recent insurgencies in the Sahel region affecting the West African countries of Mali, Niger and Mauritania and low intensity conflicts surging within notably stable countries such as Ghana, Nigeria and Senegal sends alarming signals of the possible re-surfacing of internal and regional violent conflicts. These conflicts are often hinged on several factors including poverty, human rights violations, bad governance and corruption, ethnic marginalization and small arms proliferation. Although many actors including the ECOWAS, civil society and international community have been making efforts, conflicts continue to persist in the sub-region and their resolution is often protracted. This paper posits that the poor understanding of the fundamental causes of West Africa’s violent conflicts and civil strife would likely cause the sub-region to continue experiencing and suffering the brunt of these violent wars

Developing a health and human rights training program for french speaking Africa: lessons learned, from needs assessment to a pilot program

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The importance of human rights education has widely been recognized as one of the strategies for their protection and promotion of health. Yet training programs have not always taken into account neither local needs, nor public health relevance, nor pedagogical efficacy.</p> <p>The objectives of our study were to assess, in a participative way, educational needs in the field of health and human rights among potential trainees in six French-speaking African countries and to test the feasibility of a training program through a pilot test. Ultimately the project aims to implement <it>a health and human rights training program most appropriate to the African context</it>.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p><it>Needs assessment </it>was done according to four approaches: Revue of available data on health and human rights in the targeted countries; Country visits by one of the authors meeting key institutions; Focus group discussions with key-informants in each country; A questionnaire-based study targeting health professionals and human rights activists.</p> <p><it>Pilot training program</it>: an interactive e-learning pilot program was developed integrating training needs expressed by partner institutions and potential trainees.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Needs assessment showed high public health and human rights challenges that the target countries have to face. It also showed precise demands of partner institutions in regard to a health and human rights training program. It further allowed defining training objectives and core competencies useful to potential employers and future students as well as specific training contents.</p> <p>A pilot program allowed testing the motivation of students, the feasibility of an interactive educational approach and identifying potential difficulties.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>In combining various approaches our study was able to show that training needs concentrate around tools allowing the identification of basic human rights violations in the health system, the analysis of their causes and coordinated responses through specific intervention projects.</p

Health Research Profile to assess the capacity of low and middle income countries for equity-oriented research

BACKGROUND: The Commission on Health Research for Development concluded that "for the most vulnerable people, the benefits of research offer a potential for change that has gone largely untapped." This project was designed to assess low and middle income country capacity and commitment for equity-oriented research. METHODS: A multi-disciplinary team with coordinators from each of four regions (Asia, Latin America, Africa and Central and Eastern Europe) developed a questionnaire through consensus meetings using a mini-Delphi technique. Indicators were selected based on their quality, validity, comprehensiveness, feasibility and relevance to equity. Indicators represented five categories that form the Health Research Profile (HRP): 1) Research priorities; 2) Resources (amount spent on research); 3) Production of knowledge (capacity); 4) Packaging of knowledge and 5) Evidence of research impact on policy and equity. We surveyed three countries from each region. RESULTS: Most countries reported explicit national health research priorities. Of these, half included specific research priorities to address inequities in health. Data on financing were lacking for most countries due to inadequate centralized collection of this information. The five main components of HRP showed a gradient where countries scoring lower on the Human Development Index (HDI) had a lower capacity to conduct research to meet local health research needs. Packaging such as peer-reviewed journals and policy forums were reported by two thirds of the countries. Seven out of 12 countries demonstrated impact of health research on policies and reported engagement of stakeholders in this process. CONCLUSION: Only one out of 12 countries indicated there was research on all fronts of the equity debate. Knowledge sharing and management is needed to strengthen within-country capacity for research and implementation to reduce inequities in health. We recommend that all countries (and external agencies) should invest more in building a certain minimum level of national capacity for equity-oriented research

Influence of transnational economic alliances on the IFRS convergence decision in India - institutional perspectives

This study contributes to the literature on global governance by highlighting the importance of not losing sight of the nation state as an important player in the transnational governance arena. Specifically, literature on global (accounting) regulation devotes a great deal of attention to the roles of organisations and agencies with transnational remit (such as global standard setters, donor agencies) while often downplaying the significant impacts of the more traditional cross-country links forged through economic relationships and resource dependencies between national and transnational institutional fields. This was specially noted in the case of the indirect influences of the US’s decision to delay IFRS convergence. While being interpreted as an indirect source of influence, such a decision played a very significant role on the convergence negotiations in India. The study shows how the US influence was channelled through Japan with which India has significant trade and economic relations and, most importantly, holds a joint forum specifically to discuss convergence issues. The consequences of India’s links with countries such as US and Japan in the decision-making process provide a vivid indication of the important roles of cross-governmental relationships in the global governance arena, and also question the position of transnational organisations as pervasive powers in such governance. The study’s findings clearly demonstrate that the pursuit of full IFRS convergence strongly favoured by the transnational forces was invariably challenged in the Indian context by the influences of powerful nation states advocating a more cautious approach