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International development work involves external partners bringing expertise, resources, and management for local interventions in LMICs, but there is often a gap in understandings of relevant local shared values. There is a widespread need to better design interventions which accommodate relevant elements of local culture, as emphasised by recent discussions in global health research regarding neo-colonialism. One recent innovation is the concept of producing 'cultural protocols' to precede and guide community engagement or intervention design, but without suggestions for generating them. This study explores and demonstrates the potential of an approach taken from another field, named WeValue InSitu, to generate local culturally-informed protocols. WeValue InSitu engages stakeholder groups in meaning-making processes which 'crystallize' their envelope of local shared values, making them communicable to outsiders.Our research context is understanding and reducing child stunting, including developing interventions, carried out at the Senegal and Indonesia sites of the UKRI GCRF Action Against Stunting Hub. Each national research team involves eight health disciplines from micro-nutrition to epigenetics, and extensive collection of samples and questionnaires. Local culturally-informed protocols would be generally valuable to pre-inform engagement and intervention designs. Here we explore generating them by immediately following the group WeValue InSitu crystallization process with specialised focus group discussions exploring: what local life practices potentially have significant influence on the environments affecting child stunting, and which cultural elements do they highlight as relevant. The discussions will be framed by the shared values, and reveal linkages to them. In this study, stakeholder groups like fathers, mothers, teachers, market traders, administrators, farmers and health workers were recruited, totalling 83 participants across 20 groups. Themes found relevant for a culturally-informed protocol for locally-acceptable food interventions included: specific gender roles; social hierarchies; health service access challenges; traditional beliefs around malnutrition; and attitudes to accepting outside help. The concept of a grounded culturally-informed protocol, and the use of WeValue InSitu to generate it, has thus been demonstrated here. Future work to scope out the advantages and limitations compared to deductive culture studies, and to using other formative research methods would now be useful., (© 2024. The Author(s).)

Objective: This work aims to demonstrate an original approach to identify links between locally situated shared values and contextual factors of stunting. Stunting results from multi-factorial and multi-sectoral determinants, but interventions typically neglect locally situated lived experiences, which contributes to problematic designs that are not meaningful for those concerned and/or relatively ineffective., Design: This case study investigates relevant contextual factors in two steps: by first facilitating local stakeholder groups ( n 11) to crystallise their shared-values-in-action using a specialised method from sustainability studies (WeValue_InSitu (WVIS)). Secondly , participants ( n 44) have focus group discussions (FGD) about everyday practices around child feeding/food systems, education and/or family life. Because the first step strongly grounds participants in local shared values, the FGD can reveal deep links between contextual factors and potential influences on stunting., Setting: Kaffrine, Senegal, an 'Action Against Stunting Hub' site. December 2020., Participants: Eleven stakeholder groups of mothers, fathers, grandmothers, pre-school teachers, community health workers, farmers, market traders and public administrators., Results: Local contextual factors of stunting were identified, including traditional beliefs concerning eating and growing practices; fathers as decision-makers; health worker trust; financial non-autonomy for women; insufficient water for preferred crops; merchants' non-access to quality produce; religious teachings and social structures affecting children's food environment., Conclusions: Local contextual factors were identified. Pre-knowledge of these could significantly improve effectiveness of intervention designs locally, with possible applicability at other sites. The WVIS approach proved efficient and useful for making tangible contextual factors and their potential links to stunting, via a lens of local shared values, showing general promise for intervention research.

The emerging and re-emerging vector-borne diseases transmitted by key freshwater organisms have remained a global concern. As one of the leading biodiversity hotspots, the African ecoregion is suggested to harbour the highest number of freshwater organisms globally. Among the commonly found organisms in the African ecoregion are mosquitoes and snails, with a majority of their life cycle in freshwater, and these freshwater organisms can transmit diseases or serve as carriers of devastating diseases of public health concerns. However, synthetic studies to link the evident abundant presence and wide distribution of these vectors across the freshwater ecosystems in Africa with the increasing emerging and re-emerging vector-borne diseases in Africa are still limited. Here, we reviewed documented evidence on vector-borne diseases and their transmission pathways in Africa to reduce the knowledge gap on the factors influencing the increasing emerging and re-emerging vector-borne diseases across Africa. We found the population distributions or abundance of these freshwater organisms to be increasing, which is directly associated with the increasing emerging and re-emerging vector-borne diseases across Africa. Furthermore, we found that although the current changing environmental conditions in Africa affect the habitats of these freshwater organisms, current changing environmental conditions may not be suppressing the population distributions or abundance of these freshwater organisms. Instead, we found that these freshwater organisms are extending their geographic ranges across Africa, which may have significant public health implications in Africa. Thus, our study demonstrates the need for future studies to integrate the environmental conditions of vectors' habitats to understand if these environmental conditions directly or indirectly influence the vectorial capacities and transmission abilities of vectors of diseases. We propose that such studies will be necessary to guide policymakers in making informed policies to help control vector-borne diseases., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest Authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2022 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Antibiotic pollution is becoming an increasingly severe threat globally. Antibiotics have emerged as a new class of environmental pollutants due to their expanding usage and indiscriminate application in animal husbandry as growth boosters. Contamination of aquatic ecosystems by antibiotics can have a variety of negative impacts on the microbial flora of these water bodies, as well as lead to the development and spread of antibiotic-resistant genes. Various strategies for removing antibiotics from aqueous systems and environments have been developed. Many of these approaches, however, are constrained by their high operating costs and the generation of secondary pollutants. This review aims to summarize research on the distribution and effects of antibiotics in aquatic environments, their interaction with other emerging contaminants, and their remediation strategy. The ecological risks associated with antibiotics in aquatic ecosystems and the need for more effective monitoring and detection system are also highlighted., Competing Interests: Declaration of Competing Interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2022 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Background: Copepods are key components of aquatic ecosystems and can help regulate the global carbon cycle. Much attention has been paid to the species diversity of copepods worldwide, but the phylogeography and genetic diversity of copepods in Nigeria is unexplored., Results: Using a mitochondrial cytochrome c oxidase subunit I marker, we preformed phylogenetic and phylogeographic analyses for Cyclopidae copepods in Southeast Nigeria. A high species diversity of Cyclopidae in Nigeria: 5 species of Tropocyclops, 5 species of Mesocyclops and 2 species of Thermocyclops from Cyclopidae were identified in 15 populations. Moreover, we detected 18 unique haplotypes, which fell into two distinct clades. Pairwise genetic distances (uncorrected p-distances) among the species of Cyclopidae ranged from 0.05 to 0.257. Several species co-existed in the same lake, and some haplotypes were shared among different geographic populations, suggesting a dispersal of Cyclopidae in our sampling region. Finally, we found that the population genetic diversity for each species of Cyclopidae was low in Nigeria., Conclusions: Our findings explored the species diversity and distribution of copepods within the family Cyclopidae for 15 Nigerian freshwater ecosystems: a high species diversity of Cyclopidae copepods was detected over a small geographic sampling range. Results from this study contribute to a better understanding of copepod diversity of Nigerian freshwater ecosystems.

Sustainable development is a global aim, aided in its application by the use of social, environmental and economic indicators for monitoring, planning, and assessment. However, several significant weaknesses are reported which reveal the need for improvement of the social indicators such as problems of being difficult to localize; to measure, and to be complete; being less commonly used; and thus, leading to assessments which are unbalanced across the three domains. Here we demonstrate that a values-based approach called WeValue InSitu, previously known to reliably 'crystallize' local shared values, can be successfully used as a bolt-on process to produce localized social indicators for direct insertion into the SuRF-UK process. SuRF-UK is a widely used decision-support framework for sustainable remediation of brownfield sites, and we apply it here to a hypothetical scenario analysis for a real community in villages near a derelict Salt Lake in Nigeria. Results show the WeValue InSitu approach resolves the reported challenges of localized social indicators, does not introduce any new issues, and in addition provides a route for wider participation and auditability. The study shows that a mechanism of red-flag boundaries may need to be introduced into SuRF-UK to allow veto of unacceptable breaches of social issues by proposed scenarios., Competing Interests: Declaration of Competing Interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper, (Copyright © 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)