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Briefing
Addressing Norms, Values, Practices and Beliefs regarding Reproductive Health in South Sudan
Although in parts of South Sudan the situation is unstable which necessitates humanitarian action, in other parts of the country development programmes are taken up with the communities. In Northern and Western Bahr el Ghazal states, Aweil North and Wau…
Briefing
Ebola, Politics and Ecology: Beyond the ‘Outbreak Narrative’
The origin of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa has been traced to the likely confluence of a virus, a bat, a two-year-old child and an under equipped rural health centre. Understanding how these factors may have combined in south-eastern…
Briefing
Local Engagement in Ebola Outbreaks and Beyond in Sierra Leone
Containment strategies for Ebola rupture fundamental features of social, political and religious life. Control efforts that involve local people and appreciate their perspectives, social structures and institutions are therefore vital. Unfortunately such approaches have not been widespread in West Africa…
Background report
The International Response to Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza: Science, Policy and Politics
Over the last decade, the avian influenza virus, H5N1, has spread across most of Asia and Europe and parts of Africa. In some countries – including Indonesia, China, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Nigeria and Egypt – the avian disease has probably become…
Background report
Epidemics for All? Governing Health in a Global Age
Current global health policy is dominated by a preoccupation with infectious diseases and in particular with emerging or re-emerging infectious diseases that threaten to ‘break out’ of established patterns of prevalence or virulence into new areas and new victims. This…
Evidence review
Multiple Shocks, Coping and Welfare Consequences: Natural Disasters and Health Shocks in the Indian Sundarbans
Based on a household survey in Indian Sundarbans hit by tropical cyclone Aila in May 2009, this study tests for evidence and argues that health and climatic shocks are essentially linked forming a continuum and with exposure to a marginal…
Background report
Risk, Modernity and the H5N1 Virus in Action in Indonesia: A Multi-Sited Study of the Threats of Avian and Human Pandemic Influenza
This thesis examines the Influenza A/H5N1 virus in action through an ethnographic study focused on the entwined concepts of risk and modernity. The objective is to explain why the response to the virus has been challenged in Indonesia. Concerned with…
Background report
The Political Economy of Avian Influenza Response and Control in Vietnam
As a country suffering from large-scale AI outbreaks and receiving considerable international support, Vietnam provides a crucial case not to be missed in any analysis of the global AI crisis. Vietnam is also interesting because of two paradoxes in her…
Working paper
Researching social policy
This working paper reviews some of the main methodological approaches to emerge in the 1990s, reflecting on both their objectives and their limitations.
Background report
Changing Understandings of HIV and AIDS through Treatment Interactions
The problem of HIV internationally has many wide ranging impacts on people, communities and countries’ development. In the last decade antiretroviral (ARV) treatment has emerged as the major scientific-technical solution, albeit a costly one. Access to ARV treatment is of…
Background report
To Pandemic or Not? Reconfiguring Global Responses to Influenza
Examining the political economy of knowledge in responses to the 2009-10 influenza pandemic, this paper argues that globally, and in many individual nations, techno-scientific narratives constructed by bio-medical actor networks failed to correspond with the more variegated narratives of multifarious…
Briefing
The Pathology of Inequality: Gender and Ebola in West Africa
The international response to Ebola has been decried for being ‘too slow, too little, too late’. As well as racing to respond, we need to consider what has happened over the past decades to leave exposed fault lines that enabled…
Briefing
The ‘One Man Can’ Model: Community Mobilisation as an Approach to Promote Gender Equality and Reduce HIV Vulnerability in South Africa
This story of change pulls out the key findings and recommendations from EMERGE case study 6, which focuses on the One Man Can initiative in South Africa. The initiative works through community mobilisation to question gender norms and improve knowledge…
Briefing
‘One hand can’t clap by itself’: Engagement of Boys and Men in KMG’s Intervention to Eliminate FGM-C in Kembatta Zone, Ethiopia
This story of change pulls out the key findings and recommendations from EMERGE case study 3, which focuses on the work of KMG to eliminate female genital mutilation-cutting in Ethiopia.
Evidence review
Developing, Implementing and Evaluating the SOFIE Model: Supporting Increased Educational Access for Vulnerable Pupils in Malawi
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…
Background report
Polio Vaccines – Difficult to Swallow The Story of a Controversy in Northern Nigeria
Global health and poverty reduction discourses have recognised immunisation as one of the most affordable and effective means of reducing child mortality and in a broader sense, as an essential contribution to poverty reduction efforts. While immunisation comes with countless…
Evidence review
Access to Conventional Schooling for Children and Young People Affected by HIV and AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa: A Cross-National Review of Recent Research Evidence
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…
Background report
Childhood vaccination and society in The Gambia: public engagement with science and delivery
This paper examines public engagement with routine vaccination delivery, and vaccine trials and related medical research, in The Gambia. Its approach is rooted in social and medical anthropology and ethnographic methods, but combines insights from the sociology of scientific knowledge,…
Evidence review
MMR Mobilisation: Citizens and Science in a British Vaccine Controversy
This paper examines the controversy over measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine in Britain through the lenses of social movement theory and social studies of science. Since the early 1990s, networks of parents have raised, and mobilised around, concerns that…
Evidence review
Impact and Implications of the Ebola Crisis
Political impact and implications: Initial analysis suggests that governments’ poor management of the Ebola crisis has generated frustrations and exposed citizens’ lack of trust in their governments. The Ebola crisis is likely to play a very political role in the…
Evidence review
Vulnerable Groups in Burma and Access to Services
This report focuses on vulnerable groups in Burma and access to basic services. The first part of the report outlines groups considered to be vulnerable and marginalised. These include minority ethnic groups (such as the Chin, Kachin, Karen, Karenni, Mon,…
Evidence review
Helpdesk Research Report: Mobile Telephony for Improved Health Service and Data Management
This report provides some recent examples of the use of mobile telephony to improve health serviceoutcomes. There is significant potential for the use of mobile telephony to improve health serviceoutcomes and data management. Opportunities include: serving as a less costly…
Background report
Zoonotic Diseases: Who Gets Sick, and Why? Explorations from Africa
Global risks of zoonotic disease are high on policy agendas. Increasingly, Africa is seen as a 'hotspot', with likely disease spillovers from animals to humans. This paper explores the social dynamics of disease exposure, demonstrating how risks are not generalised,…
Briefing
Community-led Ebola Action (CLEA) and the Social Mobilisation Action Consortium (SMAC)
The Community Led Ebola Action (CLEA) has empowered communities to do their own analysis and take their own action to become Ebola-free in Sierra Leone. CLEA has focused on triggering collective action by inspiring communities to understand the urgency and…
Field notes
Community Led Ebola Management and Eradication (CLEME)
The CLEME (Community Led Ebola Man- agement and Eradication) programme aims at triggering the behavioural change needed by the communities to strengthen community resilience to the outbreak and prevent further resurgence by ensuring real and sustainable improvements through: Providing the communities…
Research paper
Understanding why ebola deaths occur at home in urban Montserrado County, Liberia
Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) home deaths occur as the result of infected persons not being detected early and sent to Ebola Treatment Units (ETU) where they can access care and have an improved chance of survival. From a public health…
Field notes
Ebola: demanding accountability and mobilizing societies to avoid a deadly relapse
The enduring Ebola epidemic has taught the world some hard lessons over the last 12 months, which we must take to heart. Despite early warnings, and the extraordinary efforts of local healthcare workers and private medical humanitarian organisations, the epidemic…
Field notes
Community-Based Ebola Care Centres: A Formative Evaluation
The Ebola outbreak in West Africa differed from others in its unprecedented size and the high proportion of human-to-human transmission occurring in the community. This report presents an analysis of the impact of Community Care Centres (CCCs) on communities in…
Briefing
Africa APPG inquiry: Community led health systems & the Ebola outbreak
The Ebola crisis of 2014-15 has brought questions around the roles of communities and health systems into sharp relief – both in relation to crisis response, and to the challenges of post-crisis recovery and building resilience to future epidemics. The…
Background report
Ebola Crisis Appeal – Response Review
This is the review of the Ebola Crisis Appeal Response in Sierra Leone of the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) that unites 13 of the largest UK humanitarian charities to raise funds in response to major international humanitarian crises. The review…
Briefing
Resistance in Guinea
There have been numerous recent analyses of the different manifestations of ‘resistance’ and ‘reticence’ that continue to be critical in Guinea. The socio-historical context that has contributed to deep-rooted mistrust of the State and authority (a sense of ‘abandonment’ [the…
Field notes
A year on, Guineans finally lay Ebola souls to rest
GUECKEDOU, 28 April 2015 (IRIN) – Forty-six-year-old Maurice Ouendeno stares silently at the arm of his blue plastic lawn chair. He waits a few minutes before beginning his story. “They said we did not have the right to bury him,”…
Briefing
Never Again: Building resilient health systems and learning from the Ebola crisis
It took the threat of a global health crisis to illustrate the failings of Africa’s health systems. Resilient health systems, free at the point of use, are evidently a global public good. They are essential for the provision of universal…
Briefing
Policy Briefing on Community-based Ebola Care Centres
A component of the Ebola epidemic control policy in Sierra Leone is triage and isolation in decentralised Community Care Centres (CCCs) or Holding Units, from where transfer to Ebola treatment units (ETUs) is arranged for those diagnosed as positive. The…
Field notes
Ebola’s Ecologies – Limn January 2015 Issue
This issue of Limn on “Ebola’s Ecologies” examines how the 2014 Ebola outbreak has put the norms, practices, and institutional logics of global health into question, and examines the new assemblages that are being forged in its wake. The contributions…
Field notes
How Ebola infection spreads and terminates in rural Sierra Leone
Ebola is a new disease in Upper West Africa. Populations have taken time to learn the nature of the risk it poses. Persons carrying infection initially do not know that they have the sickness. They carry out their daily activities,…
