A Pilot test of an oral health education module for community health workers in Ikeja LGA, Lagos State.

Objectives: The purpose of this paper is to report the experience of developing, facilitating, and evaluating a 3-day module on oral health education for Primary Health Care Workers (CHW) in Ikeja LGA Lagos State.Methods: Twenty-one CHW in Ikeja LGA were invited for a 3-day oral health education-training program in January 2015. An oral health education manual and a flip chart developed for this purpose were used during training. Participants received didactic lectures on the first two days and participated in a practical session on the third day. A pretest was done before the training session while a posttest was done immediately and 6 months after the intervention. Data entry, validation and analysis was done using SPSS version 20.Results: Majority of the respondents were female (95.0%), Community Health Officers (65.0%), mean age was 42.1± 10.4 years while mean years of experience was 9.7 ±10.8 years. There was a statistically significant increase (p= 0.000) in the mean knowledge score of participants immediately after the intervention. There was no difference between the results obtained immediately and at 6 months after the training (p= 0.328). All participants reported including oral health education in their routine health education sessions at the 6-month review. They also reported observing changes in client's perception and behavior regarding oral health. They identified the flipchart as a useful tool for the oral health education sessions in the PHC.Conclusion: PHC workers can be easily trained and deployed as oral health educatorsparticularly in areas where there is shortage of oral health care workers.Keywords: oral health; oral health education; primary health care; community health workers

Financialisation in the green economy: material connections, markets-in-the-making and Foucauldian organising actions

This paper explores the connections between financialisation in the green economy and the material commodification processes that underpin this economy. It argues that these connections are important and can be usefully conceived in terms of spaces of mutuality. These spaces of mutuality direct attention to the material processes of value creation at the level of real environmental assets. That these material processes appear thin, sluggish, fractured, hybridised or stalled in practice invites new modes of analytical engagement. One important mode of analysing these emergent green projects is to emphasise their status as durable processes of becoming or what could be called markets-in-the-making, by going beyond forms of market and economic reductionism. Michel Foucault's analysis of neoliberalism and his idea of ‘organising actions’ prove useful in this regard. Foucauldian organising actions render markets-in-the-making projects visible as durable governmental apparatuses made of disparate elements that are geographically specific, historically contingent and are aligned with an overarching market telos. Drawing on an empirical case of Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation plus carbon stock enhancement and sustainable forest management (REDD+) in Nigeria’s Cross River, the paper analyses organising actions along four meta-processes – problematisations, visions, implementation and stabilisation. It concludes by highlighting the wider implications for work on environmental financialisation

Effect of health education intervention conducted by Primary Health Care workers on oral health knowledge and practices of nursing mothers in Lagos State

Educational interventions on oral health care is traditionally carried out mainly by oral health workers in Nigeria. Despite the introduction of the National Oral Health Policy, oral health services/education is virtually non-existent in PHC centres in Nigeria. This study sought to determine the effect of a health education intervention delivered by Community Health Officers (CHO) on the oral health knowledge and practices of mothers attending a PHC centre in Lagos State. A pre-experimental, Before- After study design was employed. An interviewer- administered questionnaire was administered at baseline to assess the oral health care knowledge and practices of 267 mothers who enrolled in the programme. After enrolling the participants, CHO’s previously trained commenced a health education intervention on oral health. The intervention, which consisted of 2 lecture sessions, a demonstration session and a return demonstration session, utilising flipcharts and health information leaflets spanned a six-month period. Oral health knowledge and practices of participating mothers was evaluated 3 and 6 months after the intervention commenced using a standardised checklist. Data entry and analysis was done using SPSS version 20, P-value of <0.05 was considered significant. The mean oral health knowledge score at baseline was 4.58 (±1.37) while at 3-month and 6-month postintervention the mean scores were 4.68 (±0.97) and 4.96 (±0.49), respectively. There was a statistically significant increase (P=0.000) in the mean knowledge scores at 6 months post-intervention. Mothers who were 36 years or older and those with more than 12 years education displayed significantly better knowledge scores (P<0.05). Most (78.3%) reported using cotton wool or foam with water for their infants’ oral hygiene. By the second post-intervention visit, there was a significant change in the perception of the mothers on correct oral hygiene tool for infants (52.3%; P=0.000). Furthermore the percentage of mothers actually using toothbrush to clean their child’s mouth (98.1%; P=0.000) had increased. The oral health knowledge of the participants increased significantly following the intervention especially at the 6-month evaluation. PHC workers can successfully carry out oral health educational interventions at PHC level. The greatest value will occur with reinforced repetition of the messages

Plotting the coloniality of conservation

Funding: NORFACE/Belmont Forum (ES/S007792/1).Contemporary and market-based conservation policies, constructed as rational, neutral and apolitical, are being pursued around the world in the aim of staving off multiple, unfolding and overlapping environmental crises. However, the substantial body of research that examines the dominance of neoliberal environmental policies has paid relatively little attention to how colonial legacies interact with these contemporary and market-based conservation policies enacted in the Global South. It is only recently that critical scholars have begun to demonstrate how colonial legacies interact with market-based conservation policies in ways that increase their risk of failure, deepen on-the-ground inequalities and cement global injustices. In this article, we take further this emerging body of work by showing how contemporary, market-based conservation initiatives extend the temporalities and geographies of colonialism, undergird long-standing hegemonies and perpetuate exploitative power relations in the governing of nature-society relations, particularly in the Global South. Reflecting on ethnographic insights from six different field sites across countries of the Global South, we argue that decolonization is an important and necessary step in confronting some of the major weaknesses of contemporary conservation and the wider socio-ecological crisis itself. We conclude by briefly outlining what decolonizing conservation might entail.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

A political ecology of REDD+: property rights, militarised protectionism, and carbonised exclusion in Cross River

This paper offers a critical assessment of REDD+ in Nigeria through a political ecology perspective. Focusing on questions of property rights and resource access, it maps the discursive articulations and contestations through which carbon rights are being determined. It also shows how these articulations and contestations are linked to land and forest rights, and how they shape everyday access to the forest. Evidence from the Nigerian case suggests that factors that complicate rights and undermine access to resources for forest communities under REDD+ are immanent to the contested terrain constituted in part by REDD+ proposals, proponents’ discourses and practices geared towards securing the forest for REDD+. Efforts to secure property rights and guarantee the permanence of REDD+ forests align with economic, ecological and ideological aspirations of state and non-state actors to produce a regime of militarised protectionism. I demonstrate how, in addition to its material and symbolic facilitation of the emergent carbon forestry economy, militarised protectionism as a regime of exclusion also constitutes collateral political economies of ‘more-than-carbon’ forest resources (such as timber and non-timber forest products) which perpetuate capital accumulation by the elites. It is this kind of exclusion–accumulation dialectic legitimised by carbon forestry claims that this paper describes as carbonised exclusion. The paper thus furthers debates on the political ecology of REDD+ and other carbon forestry projects, while productively engaging technocentric literature on REDD+ and property rights

Exploring Yoruba fire cultures through proverbs

This article explores Yoruba proverbs as an essential source of popular wisdom on socio-environmental practices, in particular fire knowledge and practices. It suggests that popular wisdom around fire can be accessed through the creative reconstruction and interpretation of the historical contexts of Yoruba proverbs. Learning from the everyday knowledge and accumulated wisdom of ordinary people holds significant promise at a time of unprecedented socio-environmental crisis and widespread calls for transformative change across scales. Drawing on a collection of Yoruba proverbs, broader Yoruba oral literature, Yoruba popular culture, and a cross-disciplinary selection of academic literature, this article curates ten Yoruba proverbs on the theme of fire, using these as an entry point to interrogate aspects of ecology, local understanding and cultural practices of living with fire among the Yoruba people.Arts and Social Sciences, Irving K. Barber Faculty of (Okanagan)Community, Culture and Global Studies, Department of (Okanagan)ReviewedFacult

Transformation is what you expect, models are what you get : REDD+ and models in conservation and development

Models increasingly pervade conservation and development practice-model policies, model countries, model regions, model states, model projects, model villages, model communities and so on. These are idealized, bounded, miniature entities that seek to demonstrate the efficacy of a more substantive policy, scheme or intervention. Although political ecologists and critical scholars have analyzed models in specific interventions, there has been relatively little reflection on the common logics central to models more generally. Drawing on critical conservation and development literature and in-depth case studies of REDD+ in Tanzania and Nigeria, we identify and elaborate three core model logics: 1) problematization of the field of intervention and valorization of microcosms within it; 2) isolation and bounding which seek to order complexity and etch microcosms in space and time; 3) enrolment of actors. Although ambitious and transformational in its claims and aspirations, REDD+ has thus far manifested as an extensive network of models across socio-political scales. We argue that idealized REDD+ models enable proponents to demonstrate and 'sell' REDD+ as a 'successful' intervention, thereby allowing the scheme to persist in policy circles in spite of its failures on the ground and its lack of viability at scale. We therefore argue that models often become an end in themselves, paradoxically failing to herald the transformational intervention they were originally meant to epitomize.</p

Community mobilization at the convergence of conservation and extraction

This article examines the mobilization of local communities within spaces of conservation-extraction convergence in an African context. We draw on ethnographic research from the Cross River area of Nigeria to trace the trajectory of the conservation-extraction assemblage as produced through the recent intensification of state-led capitalist development that builds on a history of colonial and postcolonial resource regulation. Our analysis suggests that ’spaces’ of conservation and extraction convergence should be understood not only in terms of their spatiality and internal logic but also in terms of their articulation with agrarian relations that play out in such ‘soft’ techniques as community recognition and enrolment of community labour, and ‘hard’ techniques of resource exclusion. Drawing on a case study of the Ekuri people from Cross River area, we show how local mobilization within spaces of conservation-extraction convergence relies on globalized constructs and supranational alliances as well as claims of indigeneity and place-based belonging. Community mobilization exploits the cracks and tensions in these convergent spaces to forge dynamic alliances and deploy diverse strategies necessary to defend resource rights and access.Arts and Social Sciences, Irving K. Barber Faculty of (Okanagan)Non UBCCommunity, Culture and Global Studies, Department of (Okanagan)ReviewedFacultyResearche