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Enabling education review, issue 4

ENABLING EDUCATION NETWORK
December 2015

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This newsletter contains a variety of articles about inclusive education in several countries around the world. The topics focus mostly on funding, managing and sustaining inclusive education; engaging and empowering beneficiaries in finding solutions; facilitating parental and child involvement and early childhood education

Enabling Education Review, issue 4

Beneath the rhetoric: Policy to reduce the mental health treatment gap in Africa

COOPER, Sara
2015

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In this paper I problematize knowledge on reducing the ‘gap’ in treatment produced by 14 national mental health policies in Africa. To contextualize this analysis, I begin with a historic-political account of the emergence of the notion of primary health care and its entanglement within decolonization forces of the 1960s. I unpack how and why this concept was subsequently atrophied, being stripped of its more revolutionary sentiments from the 1980s. Against this backdrop, I show how, although the 14 national mental health policies are saturated with the rhetoric of primary health care and associated concepts of community participation and ownership, in practice they tend to marginalize local meaning-systems and endorse a top-down framework heavily informed by colonial medicine. The policies thus end up reproducing many of the very Eurocentric assumptions that the original primary health care notion sought to transcend. More specifically, the paradigms of evidence-based research/practice and individualised human rights become the gatekeepers of knowledge. These two paradigms, which are deeply embedded within contemporary global mental health discourse, are legislating what are legitimate forms of knowing, and by extension, valid forms of care. I argue that a greater appreciation of the primary health care concept, in its earliest formulation, offers a potentially fruitful terrain of engagement for developing more contextually-embedded and epistemologically appropriate mental health policies in Africa. This in turn might help reduce the current ‘gap’ in mental health care treatment so many countries on the continent face.

 

Disability and the Global South (DGS), 2015, Vol. 2 No. 3

Social protection : how important are the national plans of action for orphans and vulnerable children?

SABATES-WHEELER, Rachel
PELHAM, Lissa
October 2006

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This is a review of 14 national plans of action (NPA), or in the absence of a NPA, outputs from the rapid assessment analysis and action planning (RAAAP) work for orphans and children made vulnerable by HIV/AIDS. It analyses the way that issues of social protection are incorporated into these plans and highlights areas within the plans where social protection activity may be needed to achieve stated outcomes. There are also country by country summaries of the social protection content of each NPA

The Africa campaign on disability and HIV & AIDS

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The Africa Campaign is a unifying umbrella under which disabled people's organisations, organisations of people living with HIV & AIDS, non-governmental organisations, AIDS services organisations, researchers, activists, and other citizens work collectively to achieve two main objectives: a coordinated response involving persons with disabilities in African countries to achieve inclusive national HIV & AIDS policies and programmes; and equal access for persons with disabilities in Africa to information and services on HIV & AIDS. This website contains information about the campaign and key documents

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