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Globally, there has been little growth in vaccination coverage, with countries in the Horn of Africa having the lowest vaccination rates. This study investigated factors associated with vaccination status among children under five years old in Somaliland. The 2020 Somaliland Demographic and Health Survey surveyed women aged 15–49 years from randomly selected households. This multilevel analysis included 2673 primary caregivers of children under five. Only 34% of children were ever vaccinated. Childhood vaccination coverage was positively associated with high-budget regions, high healthcare facility density, and children older than 23 months. Vaccination coverage was greater for urban and rural residents than for nomadic people. Children whose mothers could read part of one sentence or one complete sentence were more likely to be vaccinated than illiterate mothers. Children whose mothers received antenatal care (ANC) once, two to three times, or four times or more were more likely to be vaccinated than those whose mothers received no ANC. Childhood vaccination coverage in Somaliland is low. Promoting maternal ANC visits and increasing women’s literacy may enhance vaccination coverage. Funds should be allocated to areas with low resources, particularly for nomadic people, to boost vaccination uptake.

The education sector of Somalia faces many challenges to increasing the quality of higher education and this negatively impacts the development of skilled human resources and the internationalization of higher education. The scoping review's aim is to analyze the current gap in standard education policy and strategy framework and suggest the way forward to overcome the current challenges. In the study, publications related to the current higher education system, challenges, and the way forward were searched from eight resourceful databases. The search involved articles published between January 2013 to February 2023 published in the English language. Heterogeneity among the studies were checked via Cochran's Q χ² and the I2 test statistics. Data were collected using an Excel data collection sheet and summarized data in the sheet following the study protocol. The data were obtained only from reliable online sources following the inclusion and exclusion criteria. Published peer-reviewed articles and grew literature were included in the study. The Excel data sheet was the primary tool for synthesis and enhancing the understanding of analyzing the data via thematic analysis. The RevMan V.5.4 was utilized in order to synthesize the data and search for the outcomes that are relevant to our study goals. The results revealed that majority of the articles describe the higher education challenges and mentioned the gap in higher education policies and regulations. Synthesis original articles focused on the lack of uniform policy, research facilities, lack of effective curricula guidelines, and lack of effort of internationalization of higher education while narrative documents reviews paper lack of qualified staff and quality of education, Poor infrastructure, standard education policy, universal education curriculum, and lack of accountability of education sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Arterial spin labeling (ASL) is a widely used contrast-free MRI method for assessing cerebral blood flow (CBF). Despite the generally adopted ASL acquisition guidelines, there is still wide variability in ASL analysis. We explored this variability through the ISMRM-OSIPI ASL-MRI Challenge, aiming to establish best practices for more reproducible ASL analysis., Methods: Eight teams analyzed the challenge data, which included a high-resolution T1-weighted anatomical image and 10 pseudo-continuous ASL datasets simulated using a digital reference object to generate ground-truth CBF values in normal and pathological states. We compared the accuracy of CBF quantification from each team's analysis to the ground truth across all voxels and within predefined brain regions. Reproducibility of CBF across analysis pipelines was assessed using the intra-class correlation coefficient (ICC), limits of agreement (LOA), and replicability of generating similar CBF estimates from different processing approaches., Results: Absolute errors in CBF estimates compared to ground-truth synthetic data ranged from 18.36 to 48.12 mL/100 g/min. Realistic motion incorporated into three datasets produced the largest absolute error and variability between teams, with the least agreement (ICC and LOA) with ground-truth results. Fifty percent of the submissions were replicated, and one produced three times larger CBF errors (46.59 mL/100 g/min) compared to submitted results., Conclusions: Variability in CBF measurements, influenced by differences in image processing, especially to compensate for motion, highlights the significance of standardizing ASL analysis workflows. We provide a recommendation for ASL processing based on top-performing approaches as a step toward ASL standardization., (© 2024 The Authors. Magnetic Resonance in Medicine published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine.)