In this paper we review the evidence on the impact of large shocks, such as drought, on child and adult health, with particular emphasis on Zimbabwe and Ethiopia. Our focus is on the impact of shocks on long-term outcomes, and we ask whether there are intrahousehold differences in these effects.
The evidence suggests substantial fluctuations in body weight and growth retardation in response to shocks. While there appears to be no differential impact between boys and girls, adult women are often worse affected by these shocks. For children, there is no full recovery from these losses, affecting adult health and education outcomes, as well as lifetime earnings. For adults, there is no evidence of persistent effects from transitory shocks in our data.
Initial high human development index scores and per capita income have a strong impact on the outcomes of aid to the health and education sectors.An increase in the share of the government budget allocated to education and health improves overall human development.
Aid appears to be effective in reducing maternal mortality as well as the gender gap in youth literacy, regardless of initial conditions.
After many months of prolonged closure due to fear of Ebola transmission, schools have reopened in Guinea last month.
WHO and partners have played a crucial role in preparing schools to open their doors to students.
Conflicting messages on the length of time that Ebola remains in semen after recovery make education and prevention confusing. We need to avoid mixed messages and focus on girls’ rights, says anthropologist Pauline Oosterhoff. When I met members of a women’s secret society in Sierra Leone this February, they proposed drastic measures to stop Ebola from spreading through sexual contact. All survivors should be quarantined for three months, they said. Male survivors need to be locked up because they cannot control their urge to have sex. Women need to be locked up because they cannot stop their husbands from forcing sex upon them.
When I asked them whether using condoms might be easier than quarantine, I was greeted with rolling eyes and hissing. Their men would never accept this. “They would put holes in the condoms as soon as they saw them”.
Against the context of underlying poverty, HIV/AIDS and an over-stretched and underresourced education system, many children in Malawi have reduced and sporadic access to schooling and are at risk of permanent dropout. Evidence from the sub-Saharan Africa(SSA) region suggests that a disproportionate number of marginalised children are those orphaned and made vulnerable by HIV/AIDS. International goals for Education for All (EFA) will not be realised unless education systems can reach out to and retain these children. More needs to be done in schools to address their specific needs and support their access to learning. Acknowledging this, there is a growing call for conventional primary schooling to become more open, flexible and inclusive.This report introduces a model of education that uses open, distance and flexible learning (ODFL) to strengthen and support access to learning within conventional schools.
The model utilises low-tech ODFL strategies –
This paper examines the evidence on access to conventional schooling for children and young people affected by HIV and AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa and makes recommendations for the further development of the SOFIE Project. The findings reveal the highly complex and context specific nature of the educational impact. In some areas broad adaptive capacities are emerging that may enable households to support a larger number of orphans whilst in other areas households are reaching the limits of their capacity to cope. In HIV-stressed households children have reduced educational access and attainment and maternal orphans are a particularly disadvantaged group in terms of schooling, even relative to other poor children. At the same time schools in high HIV prevalence areas are increasingly challenged to meet the educational and emotional needs of the children who walk in through their door and are unlikely to reach out to the young people who cannot attend regularly.