Resilience

Improving local health workers’ access to real-time health information will enable a faster and better response to global health threats. / Neil Brandvold, USAID

medium.com/usaid-2030 - by Ann Mei Chang - February 11, 2016

. . . The next generation of health information systems have to not only quickly and accurately deliver the necessary information to healthcare workers, but they need to be able to communicate with each other. The wide range of people involved in combating epidemics such as Ebola need to be able to efficiently and seamlessly share information to ensure coordinated responses and better resource distribution. . . .

. . . To get the conversation started, USAID put out a call for innovative concepts for improving interoperability within health information systems in the developing world. We gathered over 40 organizations for a three-day co-creation workshop in Washington, D.C. in November. Almost 100 experts — including donors, engineers, software developers and implementers in the field — arrived to co-design a solution. . . .

Some aid organisations are helping residents of Homs' Old City start over.  Photo: B. Diab/UNHCR

CLICK HERE - REPORT - UNDP - March 2015 - Syria - Alienation and Violence - Impact of Syria Crisis Report 2014 (66 page .PDF report)

irinnews.org - by Charlotte Bailey

BEIRUT, 4 January 2016 (IRIN) - Given the brutality that has come to characterise Syria’s four-year war, it is understandable that discussion of the conflict has focused on violent deaths.

But there is another scourge destroying lives in the country: economic ruin and crippling poverty – what a UN-backed report called “an equally horrendous but silent disaster.”

Some aid organisations and policy experts are finding that with more than four out of five Syrians in poverty, traditional humanitarian aid, while necessary, just isn’t enough. So they’re advocating for, and implementing, livelihood projects – intervention to assist people’s abilities to support themselves.

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Members of the Bring Back Our Girls group campaigning for the release of the Chibok schoolgirls kidnapped by Boko Haram Islamists march to meet with the Nigerian president in Abuja, on July 8, 2015. Members of the BringBackOurGirls campaign group marched on July 8 to meet President Mohammadu Buhari to pressure him to end the deadly Boko Haram insurgency and free 219 schoolgirls held by the group since April 2014.  PHILIP OJISUA VIA GETTY IMAGES

UNICEF has been able to reach 67,000 students by setting up temporary learning spaces and renovating and expanding schools.

huffingtonpost.com - by Eleanor Goldberg - December 22, 2015

As Boko Haram continues to wage targeted attacks against civilians in northeastern Nigeria and its neighboring countries, more than 1 million children have been forced out of school -- a consequence that leaves them more susceptible to violence, poverty and child marriage. 

submitted by Joyce Fedeczko

policy-practice.oxfam.org.uk - December 14, 2015

Resilience has rapidly become one of the most prominent objectives for the development sector, so ascertaining how best to measure it is an essential task for practioners working in monitoring and evaluation. In this discussion paper, the main insights emerging from the series of large-N Effectiveness Reviews, a set of quantitative studies that aim to evaluate impact and generate learning from a random sample of Oxfam’s projects are outlined. It is also considered how this measurement approach may adapt as ideas about resilience change both within Oxfam and in the development sector at large.

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