The Belgian migration to SEPA (Single Euro Payments Area)

The main aim of SEPA (Single European Payment Area) is to promote financial integration in Europe, more particularly in the field of cashless payment services and payment systems. It is intended to enable all economic players (businesses, consumers and public authorities) to effect payments anywhere in the SEPA zone (the 27 EU countries plus Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland) as easily, securely and efficiently as domestic payments. It must also be possible to execute these payments in accordance with a single regulatory framework within which all players have the same rights and obligations. To that end, the European Parliament and the Council adopted a directive on payment services in the internal market, which has to be transposed into national law by 1 November 2009. The SEPA migration is a process whereby the current national payment instruments are gradually replaced by standardised European instruments. More precisely, European instruments have been developed for credit transfers and direct debits, while a general framework has been set up for payment cards. The development of standards for these payment instruments and the organisation of the migration to SEPA were largely decided by the banking sector. For that purpose, interbank consultation bodies were set up at national and European level, and special structures were created to encourage societal dialogue concerning SEPA and its implementation. In Belgium, the organisational structures behind the SEPA migration are the “Steering Committee on the future of means of payment” and the SEPA interbank Forum. SEPA is being created in phases. The signal for the operational launch was given just over a year ago : since 28 January 2008 it has been possible to use the European transfer to effect payments anywhere in the SEPA area. The banking sector set the launch date for the European direct debit at European level : it will coincide with the date on which the payment services directive has to be transposed into national law, namely 1 November 2009. The success of the launch of the European direct debit on that date will depend mainly on a number of legal aspects, its adoption by the market, and the time taken to implement it in banks and businesses. The SEPA Card Framework is ready and has applied since 1 January 2008, but that has had little or no practical impact on the Belgian market in bank cards. Although the original plan for switching to a new payment card scheme in a single operation was abandoned, the Belgian market is technically ready for the introduction of new card payment schemes.SEPA (Single European Payment Area), payments instruments, financial integration, Payment Services Directive, banking standards

Cost-effective health promotion: community health clubs

Cost-effective health promotion: community health club

Hygiene and sanitation strategies in Uganda: how to achieve sustainable behaviour change?

Breaking the faecal:oral disease transmission route is a vital first step towards overcoming preventable disease and, ultimately, poverty. Simple knowledge transfer, whatever methodology is employed, does not automatically result in changed or improved behaviour. There is growing consensus that to achieve behaviour change in hygiene and sanitation practices communities, both rural and high-density peri-urban, need to be supported in ways that will stimulate social cohesion and result in group decisions being taken. Such cohesion and the building of social capital can ensure that peer pressure comes to bear and poor hygiene practices can thus be challenged. This paper considers several approaches to Hygiene Promotion and Sanitation that are currently receiving attention. It attempts to tease out some of the common threads that appear to be stimulating social cohesion and peer pressure towards achieving behaviour change that will be sustained and also considers the current hopeful situation in Uganda

Decreasing communicable diseases through improved hygiene in community health clubs

Community Health Clubs in Zimbabwe have proved an effective way to sustain hygiene behaviour change. In 2001, a survey of households indicated significant improvement in hand washing, safe sanitation, good water protection and food hygiene showing 16% difference between health club and control areas (p>0.001) in Makoni and 50% in Tsholotsho District. (Waterkeyn 2003) Recent research confirms that in areas of high coverage of health clubs, there have been significant decreases in reported clinical cases of communicable diseases over the past nine yeas. In Ruombwe, where health clubs have been operating since 1995 and where 80% of the households have members, diarrhoea has fallen from 404 cases in 1995 to 38 in 2003, and Bilharzia almost eliminated from 1,310 in 1995 to only one case. In addition, acute respiratory diseases have decreased from 2,136 to 159 and skin diseases have fallen from 685 to 41 in 2003

Using cell phones to monitor and evaluate behaviour change through community health clubs in South Africa

Water and sanitation practitioners are challenged not only with developing interventions to enable the Millennium Development Goals to be reached, but also to show that their projects have achieved sustainable hygiene behaviour change. However, logistical limitations of existing data collection techniques have constrained the measurement of hygiene behaviour change. For over a decade the Community Health Club approach has proven that measuring behaviour change is feasible and can easily be performed through community-based monitoring. As the originator of this methodology, a South African based NGO is further refining an already robust monitoring and evaluation plan by using an innovative tool called the Mobile Researcher platform. This involves the use of cellular phones to conduct research and is proving an ideal tool for conducting community-based research in rural Africa, as demonstrated in the Integrated Water Resource Management project in South Africa

The value of monitoring data in a process evaluation of hygiene behaviour change in Community Health Clubs to explain findings from a cluster-randomised controlled trial in Rwanda.

BACKGROUND: A cluster-Randomised Controlled Trial evaluation of the impact of the Community Health Clubs (CHCs) in the Community Based Environmental Health Promotion Programme in Rwanda in 2015 appeared to find little uptake of 7 hygiene indicators 1 year after the end of the intervention, and low impact on prevention of diarrhoea and stunting. METHODS: Monitoring data was revisited through detailed community records with all the expected inputs, outputs and external determinants analysed for fidelity to the research protocol. Five household inventory observations were taken over a 40-month period including 2 years after the end of the cRCT in a random selection of the 50 intervention CHCs and data compared to that of the trial. Focus Group Discussion with all Environmental Health Officers of the Ministry of Health provided context to understand the long-term community dynamics of hygiene behaviour change. RESULTS: It was found that the intervention had been jeopardised by external determinants with only 54% fidelity to protocol. By the end of the designated intervention period in June 2014, the treatment had reached only 58% of households with 41% average attendance at training sessions by the 4056 registered members and 51% mean completion rate of 20+ sessions. Therefore only 10% of 50 CHCs provided the full so-called 'Classic' training as per-protocol. However, sustainability of the CHCs was high, with all 50 being active 2 years after the end of the cRCT and over 80% uptake of recommended practices of the same 7 key indicators as the trial was achieved by 2017. CONCLUSIONS: The cRCT conclusion that the case study of Rusizi District does not encourage the use of the CHC model for scaling up, raises concerns over the possible misrepresentation of the potential of the holistic CHC model to achieve health impact in a more realistic time frame. It also questions the appropriateness of apparently rigorous quantitative research, such as the cluster-Randomised Controlled Trial as conducted in Rusizi District, to adequately assess community dynamics in complex interventions

Sociocultural Impacts of English and Globalisation on Women in Higher Education in Saudi Arabia

There is increasing focus on the dominance of English undermining different cultures (Bray, 1993; Canagarajah, 1999; Kubota, 2002a, 2002b; Block and Cameron, 2002; Phillipson, 2009; Altbach, 2013; Chowdhury and Le Ha, 2014; Piller, 2017). In the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), westernisation through teaching English is problematised (Elyas and Picard, 2010; Badry and Willoughby, 2015; Barnawi, 2015; Barnawi and Al-Hawsawi, 2017; Abouammoh, 2018). In Higher Education (HE) in KSA, internationalisation strategies are countered by a protectionist stance over Islamic and cultural roots. This stance is especially evident in teaching English as a Foreign Language (EFL), leading to high levels of 'cultural sensitivity' censorship in the Saudi classroom. There is an ongoing debate about cultural sensitivity and whether English is perceived as a 'threat' in the Gulf Arab Muslim EFL context (Gobert, 2015; Aljohani, 2016; El-Sakran, 2017). Located in Riyadh, at a time of strict restrictions on women, this qualitative study expands on research on the 'hidden population' (Al-Kahtani et al. 2005, p.229) within female-only Saudi Higher Education Institutes (HEIs). Using semi-structured interviews and a narrative inquiry methodology (Bell, 2002; Labov, 2003; Cortazzi, 2014), it pioneers intercultural investigation into an insider-perspective of 21 women: 8 non-Muslim western women EFL teachers and 13 Saudi women EFL learners. More specifically, it examines sociocultural changes in learning/ teaching English: learner motivation, acculturation (Jandt, 2004; Wright, 2005) and teacher demotivation (Kumazawa, 2013). Findings reveal that English is perceived more positively and used more diversely than studies hitherto claim. Metaphors such as 'a weapon', 'a key' and 'an adapter' add new gender-related concepts to investment theory (Darvin and Norton, 2015). Findings explore themes of 'likeness' and 'integration', 'othering' of women, which contribute to the understanding of the low retention of foreign faculty members in Saudi HEIs (Badry and Willoughby, 2015)

Idolatry and the artist's role with special reference to the work and thought of Andy Warhol

This thesis uses Hirsch's dual notion of intention, i. e. conscious, intentional meaning and symptomatic, unconscious meaning, in order to avoid a dead end in the critical assessment of Warhol's work. T.S. Eliot's term "objective correlative" refers to a phenomenon whereby "an inner emotional reality" is evoked by its "external equivalent". (Benet, 1965). Thus, given that no work of art is purely self-referential (as distinct from its being autonomous),Hirsch's notion allows that viewerreconstruction of a painting involves shared values and concerns; that a painting reconstructed by a viewer acquires the status of an icon through which the viewer participates in the artist's sacred cosmos. Sociology of art tends on the whole to extrapolate from actual works to the alleged conditions that gave rise to them. That it cannot predict what specific works will arise from given conditions makes it unscientific. However, its usefulness lies in its ability to reveal what values and concerns are shared by artist and viewer. This is vital for an interpretation of Warhol's work. Warhol's biography leads directly into the meaning of his work. The sickly child of an immigrant steelworker, he grew up in Pittsburgh - an epitome of the technocratic-industrial environment - and was exposed from an early age to a violent and ugly world where the disparity between the super-wealthy and the struggling workers was deeply disturbing. That Warhol himself became a multi-millionaire artistic tycoon is significant, for it means that his works, his icons, were participatory in the very cultural myths and neuroses they appear to display or even despise. That his work has meaning and is open to interpretation there is no doubt. For example, a man-made soup can, as a manifestation and containment of the sacred, is coercive. Here the sacred becomes familiar, affordable and disposable. An electric chair, a man-made instrument of death, gives man supremacy over mortality and the divine prerogative of purging the world of all evil. The essay, however, does not attempt to answer the broader questions raised by Fromm and Roszak about the spiritual emptiness of the twentieth century and the existential crises experienced by those who hunger for meaning and fasten greedily onto anything that seems to proffer a glimpse of something beyond. The essay, nevertheless, strives within this context to elucidate the valid in Warhol's wor

Rapid sanitation uptake in the internally displaced people camps of Northern Uganda through community health clubs

One of the worst humanitarian disasters in the world is currently taking place in Northern Uganda where 89% of the population in Gulu District now live in 33 Internally Displaced People’s (IDP) Camps, with low levels of home hygiene and only 5% sanitation coverage. A local NGO, Health Integrated Development Organization (HIDO), has started 116 Community Health Clubs in 15 IDPs camps, with 15,522 regular members who meet weekly for hygiene sessions. Within 4 months, health club members have constructed 8,504 latrines, 6,020 bath shelters, 3,372 drying racks, and 1,552 hand washing facilities, with an estimated 100,000 direct beneficiaries. The strategy has been based on the A.H.E.A.D Community Health Club Approach using participatory PHAST training tools, and may provide a cost-effective model for future IDP emergency sanitation programs