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In recent decades, the number of evaluated interventions to improve access to school has multiplied, but few studies report long-term impacts. This paper reports the impact of an educational intervention that provided school uniforms to children in poor communities in Kenya. The program used a lottery to determine who would receive a school uniform. Receiving a uniform reduced school absenteeism by 37 percent for the average student (7 percentage points) and by 55 percent for children who initially had no uniform (15 percentage points). Eight years after the program began, there is no evidence of sustained impact of the program on highest grade completed or primary school completion rates. A bounding exercise suggests no substantive positive, long-term impacts. These results contribute to a small literature on the long-run impacts of educational interventions and demonstrate the risk of initial impacts depreciating over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Community engagement is crucial for controlling disease outbreak and mitigating natural and industrial disasters. The COVID-19 pandemic has reconfirmed the need to elevate community engagement to build equity, trust and sustained action in future health promotion preparedness strategies. Using the health promotion strategy of strengthening community action enhances the opportunity for better outcomes. There is, therefore, a need to improve our understanding of community engagement practices during crises, scale-up good community engagement initiatives, and improve and sustain people-centered approaches to emergency responses. This paper presents five case studies from the United States, Singapore, Sierra Leone, Kenya and South Africa that demonstrate the potential strengths that can be nurtured to build resilience in local communities to help mitigate the impact of disasters and emergencies. The case studies highlight the importance of co-developing relevant education and communication strategies, amplifying the role of community leaders, empowering community members to achieve shared goals, assessing and adapting to changing contexts, pre-planning and readiness for future emergencies and acknowledgement of historic context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A gender perspective in refugee studies usually conjures up images of refugee women. Such images are an outcome of the association of vulnerability with women and children. Yet, it is not only refugee women who face monumental challenges in the country of asylum; refugee men also encounter a wide range of problems. Exile comes with obstacles for refugee men's quest to conform to culturally defined masculinity. This paper presents the nature of the challenges young refugee men predominantly from the Great Lakes region face in exile and the struggles they engage in as they seek to maintain and live up to their pre-flight notions of masculinity. The paper also shows how the men create alternative masculinities that are sustainable in a context that is largely characterized by existential uncertainties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We describe a pragmatic training-of-trainers program for the use of continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) for neonatal and pediatric patients. The program is designed for medical professionals working in low- and middle-income countries and involves 2 days of in-class training followed by 1 day of in-service training. The program was created after training in Cambodia, Ghana, Honduras, Kenya and Rwanda and addresses the issues of resource availability, cultural context and local buy-in and partnership in low- and middle-income countries. We hope others will use the training program to increase knowledge and use of CPAP with the ultimate goal of improving neonatal and pediatric survival globally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On an urban planet, slums or informal settlements present an increasing challenge for health promotion. The living conditions in complex informal settlements interact with how people navigate through their daily lives and political institutions to shape health inequities. In this article, we suggest that only a relational place-based characterization of informal settlements can accurately capture the forces contributing to existing urban health inequities and inform appropriate and effective health promotion interventions. We explore our relational framework using household survey, spatial mapping and qualitative focus group data gathered in partnership with residents and non-governmental organizations in the Mathare informal settlement in Nairobi, Kenya. All data interpretation included participation with local residents and organizations. We focus on the inter-relationships between inadequate sanitation and disease, social, economic and human rights for women and girls, who we show are most vulnerable from poor slum infrastructure. We suggest that this collaborative process results in co-produced insights about the meanings and relationships between infrastructure, security, resilience and health. We conclude that complex informal settlements require relational and context-specific data gathering and analyses to understand the multiple determinants of health and to inform appropriate and effective healthy city interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2003 Kenya abolished user fees in all government primary schools. We show that this policy contributed to a shift in demand away from free schools, where net enrollment stagnated after 2003, toward fee-charging private schools, where both enrollment and fee levels grew rapidly after 2003. These shifts had mixed distributional consequences. Enrollment by poorer households increased, but segregation between socio-economic groups also increased. We find evidence that the shift in demand toward private schooling was driven by more affluent households who (i) paid higher ex ante fees and thus experienced a larger reduction in school funding, and (ii) exited public schools in reaction to increased enrollment by poorer children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nearly every week there are stories of destructive fires in Kenyan secondary schools. Most of these are suspected arson cases, and the usual suspects are the schools' current students. This article provides the first analysis of the recent spate of school-based fire incidents, based on a comprehensive survey of media, government, and court reports, as well as primary data collected through interviews with students, educators, and administrators. This evidence clearly demonstrates that school-based arson is a phenomenon that spans regions in Kenya, and occurs in boys', girls', and mixed schools, private and public schools, and across school calendars. Current and former students explain this trend in terms of arson's effectiveness as a tactic in protest politics. Based on these findings, I argue that school-based arson is indicative of more than the contested conditions of education in Kenya today. The use of arson by students reflects what this generation has learned about how protest and politics work in Kenya. Students' recognition that destructive collective actions are efficacious in winning a response from authorities highlights that learning and feeds a reactionary mode of governance in which citizens' initiatives tend to be neglected until they pose direct threats to public peace and financing. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]