News
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FameLab 2019: Save the dates 3-6 June
The world’s greatest international science communication competition is reaching its climax. With only three minutes to enlighten and entertain judges and audience, the pressure is on for contestants as the UK National Final and International Semi-Finals take place in preparation for the International Final on Thursday 6th June.FameLab UK Final Mon 3 Jun 2019, 7:00pm - 8:30pm. Follow progress
The winner of the UK Final will join 25 national finalists from across the globe as they battle it out for a coveted place in the FameLab International Final
- FameLab International Semi-Final I Wed 5 Jun 2019, 10:00am - 12:00pm
- FameLab International Semi-Final II Wed 5 Jun 2019, 1:15pm - 3:15pm
Follow progress on Facebook
- FameLab International Final on Thu 6 Jun 2019, 8:30pm - 10:15pm
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#SeeGrowth: growing new opportunities through female-led climate-smart businesses
#See Growth, a programme of CAMFED (Campaign for Female
Education), gives girls in rural Africa the chance to grow their own futures
and was the inspiration for a vibrant
garden at the 2019 RHS* Chelsea Flower Show.
The garden won a Gold medal and drew attention to the urgent need to empower and educate young women in some of the world’s poorest communities most affected by climate change.“Giving Girls in Africa a Space to Grow” featured edible crops such as enriched beans, papaya and banana trees, sweet potatoes and grain crops grown in a landscape of red soil and rocks. At its heart was a rural Zimbabwean classroom, constructed in a true style of rendered concrete blockwork, concrete roof tiles and floors.
Background
Women produce much of Africa’s food, but struggle to access land, finance or training. CAMFED invests in low-income rural communities, where girls face acute disadvantage. Their Model “sees girls’ education as the starting point for social change. It shows that partnering with communities to unlock the leadership potential of groups of girls and women at the margins of society creates a multiplier effect like no other, delivering the only sustainable and scalable way of addressing the world’s problems with the urgency required”.
CAMFED enables girls in rural Africa to stay in education, develop thriving agricultural businesses, create jobs, and deliver prosperity.
*RHS Royal Horticultural Society of the UK
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Connecting ocean science to ocean literacy to foster ocean action
The United Nations has proclaimed a Decade of
Ocean Science for Sustainable Development (2021-2030). The
focus of the European Maritime Day 2019, being held in Lisbon, Portugal 16/17 May will be on blue entrepreneurship, research, innovation and investment to
boost sustainable technologies and emerging value chains in the wider ocean
economy.Within the programme the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO and Coexploration are organising a workshop “Connecting ocean science to ocean literacy to foster ocean action” The objective is to discuss what is the main role for ocean literacy, and the concrete actions that should be developed, in the context of this Decade.
NIDA plans to follow the workshop and will provide news of the outcomes.
More information on Ocean Literacy [http://oceanliteracy.wp2.coexploration.org/]
Including:
- DOWNLOAD PDF OF THE GUIDE
- Explore 700 +/- learning concepts in scope and sequence flow diagrams providing guidance on what to teach at each grade level
- The Ocean Literacy Framework comprises the seven principles and the Scope and Sequence.
- The Ocean Literacy Network showcases the work of the community.
- Research links to current research in ocean sciences and learning.
Ocean Literacy – Summary from College of Exploration on Vimeo.
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Where Learning is Infectious: a Vaccine Education Centre
The Vaccine Education Centre (VEC) of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia “is committed to public education about vaccine science via scientifically supported, historically accurate and emotionally compelling content”. To this end, in October 2000, they launched the Vaccines Makers Project (VMP). Initially providing a variety of school-based curricula to educate elementary, middle and high school students about how the immune system works, how diseases develop and how vaccines work to prevent them the programme has now evolved to include a variety of other activities and resources, including:While the immediate goal is still to provide teachers with the information and tools necessary to teach this scientific success story, the greater opportunity is not only to immunize America’s next generation of parents against the misconceptions around vaccine safety, but also to equip them to critically evaluate the multitude of science-based topics central to how we live on and interact with this planet.
Links to resources, including:
We hope this initiative will be of interest to others. “Only when people understand and consider the scientific underpinnings of relevant topics can we expect that they will be equipped to make informed and logical decisions.”
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Global Hand Hygiene Day: Save Lives - Clean Your Hands 5 May 2019
Clean care for all – it's in your handsThe World Health Organisation (WHO) calls on everyone to be inspired by the global movement to achieve universal health coverage (UHC), i.e. achieving better health and well-being for all people at all ages, including financial risk protection, access to quality essential health care services and access to safe, effective, quality and affordable essential medicines and vaccines for all. Infection Prevention and Control, including hand hygiene, is critical to achieve UHC as it is a practical and evidence-based approach with demonstrated impact on quality of care and patient safety across all levels of the health system. 5 May 2019 has been designated as Global Hand Hygiene Day. View further details
Follow also the Global Handwashing Partnership Tweet Storm
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World Malaria Day: 'Malaria month' from Children for Health
The NGO, Children for Health, has organised all 14
translated versions of their 10 Children for Health Malaria Messages onto a
single page on their website. Scroll down to read the Top Ten Malaria Messages for children to learn and share, plus ideas on what children can do to understand, find out more, take action and reflect on the Malaria Topic. You can also find their Malaria poster, a story book and links to a couple of other interesting resources from this page.
All ‘Children for Health’ resources are free to share and download.
You may also be interested to know that World Malaria Day is today, the 25th of April.
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Getting the Message Across: Reporting on Climate Change and Sustainable Development in Asia and the Pacific
A new, free, handbook, customised for journalists reporting climate change in Asia and the Pacific. This Handbook explores the essential aspects of climate change, including its injustices to vulnerable communities, especially women and girls and least developed countries, and provides examples of best practices and stories of hope unique to the region. It can be used as a resource for journalists to understand the science of climate change, as well as helping journalists to improve their reporting of the environmental, social, economic, political, technological and other angles of the story.
The Handbook is part UNESCO’s International Programme for the Development of Communication’s Series on Journalism Education. The series aims to reinforce the capacities of journalists, journalism educators and their institutions to promote sustainable development, by enhancing the abilities of journalists to report on science, development and democratic governance.
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GeoFarmer app: collecting and sharing information on climate-related agricultural interventions
Developed by the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) in collaboration with the University of Salzburg, GeoFarmer was first deployed and tested with thousands of farmers in Colombia, Ghana, Tanzania and Uganda.The app allows community workers and smallholders to easily collect and share information on interventions such as geospatial data on weather, farm conditions including soil and crop types, and monitor the adoption of techniques to make farms more productive and resilient to climate change.
Even where internet connectivity was limited, farmers produced and shared tens of thousands of data points over short periods. The findings were published this February in Computers and Electronics in Agriculture.
Future iterations of GeoFarmer aim to expand beyond sharing comments and photos to include discussion, voting and rating mechanisms to help farmers determine best practice solutions to new challenges. Developers will also continue to expand the app’s ease-of-use to facilitate greater technology adoption across the digital literacy divide present in some smallholder communities.
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WawaRed*, Peru: improving health communication to benefit vulnerable mothers and children
Using ICTs and health Information to empower young women, the WawaRed project was launched in 2010 to support the Peruvian government's efforts to improve maternal health by tackling the poor availability and quality of health data. The system was initially piloted in 15 health centres in one district and was of scaled up to include 350 centres countrywide in 2017.The ultimate goal of WawaRed is to improve health services by reaching pregnant women with information designed to prevent unnecessary deaths and complications. Standardising and sharing data through an electronic health record system helps to ensure that the right information and advice can benefit vulnerable mothers and children. For example, the system sends customised text messages in their local language to pregnant women based on their health profile.
Over the course of this project, more than 54,000 pregnant indigenous women were registered in the WawaRed system, more than 100 midwives were trained to use eHealth records and to gather data, and 28 ministry statisticians were trained in data analysis.
Talks are now underway with Peru’s mobile telephone companies to fund the service on a national scale. Eventually, everyone in Peru could have a single eHealth record, leading to better health and healthcare and allowing the government to use its healthcare resources efficiently and effectively.
- View details of the WawaRed project
- Read the summary of the results of an impact assessment.
- Video: English, Spanish
*WawaRed ("wawa" means baby in Quechua; "red" is network in Spanish)
Source: The Communication Initiative, IDRC website and mobilecitizen (YouTube)
Image credit: Iván Reátegui Ismodes
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A Million Stories: an intercultural storytelling project
With the main objective to help refugees socialise and express themselves without necessarily speaking the host country language, ‘A Million Stories (AMS)’ is a project led by four library services - Roskilde Libraries (Denmark), in collaboration with Future Library (Greece) and the public libraries of Malmö (Sweden) and Cologne (Germany)*.The four partners invited refugees and asylum seekers, who had to flee from their homes, family and friends in the hope of living life in safety, to visit the libraries and share their life stories, thereby giving people a voice and support that their voice is heard. As a result, the project created a digital library of human experiences, containing more than 600 stories from refugees who have fled to EU in recent years.
The AMS platform enables refugees to share their experiences, culture and life stories in various formats including film, audio, visual and written forms. By doing so, not only are a wide range of stories included, allowing refugees to tell them regardless of language and storytelling capabilities, but they can also communicate to a wider audience.
The combination of “A Million Stories” range of formats and geographical outreach creates a realistic picture of refugee/asylum seekers’ lives and what they have been through until the present day, enabling communication not only on a social level but also on an educational or even political level. The project has also fostered respect for intercultural diversity in the host populations by creating references everyone can recognize from their own everyday lives.
*co-funded by the European Union's Creative Europe agency.