Thirty years after the concept of primary health care (PHC) was declared the path to health for all, a crisis continues in human resources for health in Africa. This involves the low prioritisation of education and training for primary health care personnel (PHCP) which is crucial to effective practice in severely under-resourced settings. The curriculum required for this education, involving pictures and textual materials, must meet the needs and capacities of the learners so that learning transfer can occur and community health needs are met. This research set out to establish the basis upon which text and pictures should be incorporated into curriculum to address the requirements of community health nurses (CHNs) in The Gambia. A pragmatic, three phased, mixed methodological design was selected for this study. Curricula for African PHCP were first collected and examined using content analysis to determine the rationale for pictures and text. The second phase employed psychometric testing and statistical analysis to establish if learning style preferences for pictures and text were important in Gambian CHN learning. In the final phase, interviews with CHN students explored their preferences for pictures and text and how these preferences should be accommodated in curriculum. The research found that much of the PHCP curriculum analysed was generic, used traditional didactic approaches and focused on written knowledge-based assessment. Learning style preferences were not found to be a consideration and were unidentifiable in this context. Socio-cultural factors significantly impacted upon student CHN learning, but were not adequately addressed in the curriculum materials examined. In addition, CHNs preferred practical learning through primary, multi-sensory experiences. These findings support the conclusion that the localisation of CHN curriculum is required in order to provide a socio-cultural context for learning that is meaningful, rich, interactive and responsive to learner needs. This demands a reconnection with PHC principles of equity and participation which should underpin this curriculum. The thesis argues that an ecological framework better articulates the link between PHCP education and training, practice, and community needs, and should serve to guide curriculum design. Six strategies are identified that could be extended to African PHCP course design.

<p>In this text about the mathematics education in a primary school in the Gambia, I am researching what this mathematics education consists of and what surrounding factors might be affecting it. The pupils of the school in question speak several different languages. This language situation is one of the factors considered in the research. A connection between the real life led by the pupils and their mathematics education was a second factor. The third factor is financial resources or the lack thereof. I wanted to see if a lack of sufficient financial resources was visible in forming the education and the teaching of the pupils. The teaching of mathematics in the school seemed to be based on behaviourism, but could perhaps take benefit from the ethnomathematics perspective. Through observations, analyzing documents and an interview, I realized that the government had set ambitious objectives for the teachers to follow, but due to lack of economical resources, as far as my study found, these are not achieved. As ambitious objectives, which are not followed by sufficient funding is an issue not only applicable in Gambian schools and since Sweden is a growing multicultural society, I can use my knowledge from this study in my work in Swedish schools.</p> / MFS - Minor Field Studies

In this text about the mathematics education in a primary school in the Gambia, I am researching what this mathematics education consists of and what surrounding factors might be affecting it. The pupils of the school in question speak several different languages. This language situation is one of the factors considered in the research. A connection between the real life led by the pupils and their mathematics education was a second factor. The third factor is financial resources or the lack thereof. I wanted to see if a lack of sufficient financial resources was visible in forming the education and the teaching of the pupils. The teaching of mathematics in the school seemed to be based on behaviourism, but could perhaps take benefit from the ethnomathematics perspective. Through observations, analyzing documents and an interview, I realized that the government had set ambitious objectives for the teachers to follow, but due to lack of economical resources, as far as my study found, these are not achieved. As ambitious objectives, which are not followed by sufficient funding is an issue not only applicable in Gambian schools and since Sweden is a growing multicultural society, I can use my knowledge from this study in my work in Swedish schools. / MFS - Minor Field Studies

<p>Can cross-border interaction: interpersonal, economic, and otherwise, help ease relations between neighbouring political entities facing conflicts of interest and other differences?</p><p>1. How and why are border crossing communication routes created and maintained?</p><p>2. Under what circumstances are they used and how?</p><p>3. In what ways do they alter the conditions of a conflict between the parties that they link?</p><p>4. How do governments relate to the communication route and in what ways do they fit it into their policies?</p><p>Seeking to reconcile the theories of the international system advanced by Hedley Bull and John W. Burton, we conduct a comparative case study, based on contemporary media and scholarship, of the situations regarding Senegal and the Gambia, as well as the two de facto (if not de jure) republics of Cyprus to answer these questions. Having sought to estimate the causes and effects of border crossing, we find that host factors, in particular divergent economies and the utilization of international partners, may in fact come to stem from the issues of border-crossing activity and contribute to complicating existing conflicts rather than resolve them.</p>

Thirty years after the concept of primary health care (PHC) was declared the path to health for all, a crisis continues in human resources for health in Africa. This involves the low prioritisation of education and training for primary health care personnel (PHCP) which is crucial to effective practice in severely under-resourced settings. The curriculum required for this education, involving pictures and textual materials, must meet the needs and capacities of the learners so that learning transfer can occur and community health needs are met. This research set out to establish the basis upon which text and pictures should be incorporated into curriculum to address the requirements of community health nurses (CHNs) in The Gambia. A pragmatic, three phased, mixed methodological design was selected for this study. Curricula for African PHCP were first collected and examined using content analysis to determine the rationale for pictures and text. The second phase employed psychometric testing and statistical analysis to establish if learning style preferences for pictures and text were important in Gambian CHN learning. In the final phase, interviews with CHN students explored their preferences for pictures and text and how these preferences should be accommodated in curriculum. The research found that much of the PHCP curriculum analysed was generic, used traditional didactic approaches and focused on written knowledge-based assessment. Learning style preferences were not found to be a consideration and were unidentifiable in this context. Socio-cultural factors significantly impacted upon student CHN learning, but were not adequately addressed in the curriculum materials examined. In addition, CHNs preferred practical learning through primary, multi-sensory experiences. These findings support the conclusion that the localisation of CHN curriculum is required in order to provide a socio-cultural context for learning that is meaningful, rich, interactive and responsive to learner needs. This demands a reconnection with PHC principles of equity and participation which should underpin this curriculum. The thesis argues that an ecological framework better articulates the link between PHCP education and training, practice, and community needs, and should serve to guide curriculum design. Six strategies are identified that could be extended to African PHCP course design.

Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 45-06, page: 3137. Adviser: Jeanne B. Martin. Includes bibliographical references.

L’objet de cette thèse est d’analysé les processus de construction de territorialités et de territoires transfrontaliers. Discontinuité géographique majeure, la frontière est traditionnellement définie comme la limite d’un territoire d’Etat, symbole de sa souveraineté. Les frontières Sénégal-Gambie et Sénégal-Guinée Conakry qui gardent cette fonction, créent de nombreux effets-frontières largement exploités par les populations. Les acteurs sociaux et marchands des zones frontalières sénégambiennes, à travers leurs diverses mobilités consécutives à l’effet-frontière connectent divers lieux de part et d’autre de la frontière. Ils produisent ainsi divers territoires, espaces vécus et appropriés. La frontière est ici, lien et couture. Espaces partagés et de fortes solidarités intercommunautaires, ces territoires transfrontaliers sont cependant l’objet de compétitions et de conflits qui sont aujourd’hui pris en charge par les acteurs locaux à travers diverses initiatives de coopération transfrontalière. Le renforcement voire l’institutionnalisation de ces initiatives locales pourrait se faire dans le cadre d’une gouvernance transfrontalière impliquant les diverses familles d’acteurs (société civile locale, collectivités territoriales, Etat). Cette gouvernance transfrontalière bénéficie du processus de décentralisation en cours au Sénégal, en Guinée Conakry et en Gambie et d’autre part, des progrès réalisés récemment par la CEDEAO dans le cadre de l’institutionnalisation de la coopération transfrontalière. Elle pourrait cependant être handicapée par les divergences d’intérêts et les tensions entre les Etats, notamment sénégalo-gambien. / The object of this thesis is to analyze the processes of construction of territorialities and of cross-border territories. Open major geographic, the border is traditionally defined as the limit of a State territory, the symbol of its sovereignty. The borders Senegal-Gambia and Senegal-Guinea Conakry, who keep this function, create many borders-effects widely exploited by the populations. The social actors and merchants of the border areas of Senegambia, through their various motilities, consecutive to the border-effect connect various locations on both sides. Therefore they create various territories, spaces experienced and owned. The border is here, link and separation. Shared spaces and strong communal solidarities, these cross-border territories are however the object of competitions and conflicts which are today supported by local actors through various initiatives for cross-border cooperation. The strengthening or even the institutionalization of these local initiatives could be done within the framework of cross-border governance involving the various families of actors (local civil society, territorial communities, and the State). This cross-border governance benefits from the ongoing process of decentralization in Senegal, Guinea Conakry and the Gambia and on the other hand, the recent progress made by ECOWAS in the framework of the institutionalization of cross-border cooperation. It could however be hampered by differences of interests and tensions between States, including Senegalese-Gambian.

Short Food Supply Chains (SFSC) can be understood as ‘alternatives’ to conventional, complex food chains that tend to dominate contemporary agri-food systems. They redefine producer-consumer relations through socially and physically ‘closer’, more transparent supply chains founded upon quality cues associated with provenance, whereby products become embedded with information about the spaces of production. It has been argued that SFSC can have significant socio-economic benefits for rural development, providing livelihoods for small-scale, independent food producers who would otherwise be marginalised from food markets. SFSC have received plenty of attention amongst ‘alternative’ agri-food scholars in recent years. However, empirical research has typically addressed SFSC in relation to a specific set of values, politics and traditions, examining a locale or region in relation to cultural structures ingrained in a particular context. This has resulted in vast amounts of agri-food literature with specific reference to the contexts of Europe, North America and other global North regions. Attention to countries from the global South has increased recently, but there are limited cross-cultural, comparative analyses between regions from the global North and South. This is surprising given that small-scale food producers the world over face similar obstacles associated with access to markets, adaptation to climate change, contradictory policies and development programmes and increased competition from imports. This research investigates how SFSC operate in context, drawing on evidence from case studies in rural regions of The Gambia, West Africa and East England; illustrative cases of the global North and South. This thesis adopts an inductive methodology, incorporating grounded theory and a range of qualitative methods and data analysis techniques. The regional food group Tastes of Anglia and social enterprise named ‘Gambia is Good’ served as gatekeepers and provided access to small-scale food producers in each case. The Sustainable (Rural) Livelihoods Framework as originally conceived by the Department for International Development (DFID) was used as a conceptual toolkit to guide data collection and analyses. This involved an amalgamation of the largely disparate ‘alternative’ agri-food literature with that of sustainable livelihoods, revealing the important role that horizontal embeddedness and vertical embeddedness have in the context of SFSC. This research has found that in The Gambia, limited access to capital assets, infrastructural constraints and a lack of social embeddedness between rural producers and customers in the high value tourist industry undermines SFSC as viable livelihood strategies. This is in contrast to the UK, where food producers have access to a wider set of resources and can also draw on established ‘quality’ cues associated with Product-Process-Place linkages to market their products. Results suggest this is due to the historical (agri)cultural trajectories of East Anglia and spatial-temporal synergies that enable products embedded with information to be differentiated in competitive marketplaces. The processes enabling this differentiation can be considered as a form of cultural capital. This cannot be as readily drawn upon in The Gambia given its different agricultural and political-economic histories, and comparatively weaker forms of vertical embeddedness. This raises questions about the relevance and transferability of SFSC models to contexts such as The Gambia and other ‘similar’ regions in sub-Saharan Africa and the global South. The broader implications of these findings are discussed and five future research agendas that explore the key processes of horizontal and vertical embeddedness in both the global North and South are presented.

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