World Development Report 2004 : making services work for poor people
01 Sep 2003-pp 1-289
TL;DR: The World Development Report (WDR) 2004 warns that broad improvements in human welfare will not occur unless poor people receive wider access to affordable, better quality services in health, education, water, sanitation, and electricity as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: The World Development Report (WDR) 2004 warns that broad improvements in human welfare will not occur unless poor people receive wider access to affordable, better quality services in health, education, water, sanitation, and electricity. Without such improvements, freedom from illness and from illiteracy, two of the most important ways poor people can escape poverty, will remain elusive to many. This report builds an analytical and practical framework for using resources, whether internal or external, more effectively by making services work for poor people. The focus is on those services that have the most direct link with human development, education, health, water, sanitation, and electricity. This presents an enormous challenge, because making services work for the poor involves changing, not only service delivery arrangements, but also public sector institutions, and how foreign aid is transferred. This WDR explores the many dimensions of poverty, through outcomes of service delivery for poor people, and stipulates affordable access to services is low especially for poor people in addition to a wide range of failures in quality. The public responsibility is highlighted, addressing the need for more public spending, and technical adjustments, based on incentives and understanding what, and why services need to be improved. Thus, through an analytical framework, it is suggested the complexity of accountability must be established, as well as instruments for reforming institutions to improve services, illustrated through various case studies, both in developing, and developed countries. The report further outlines that scaling up reforms means sectoral reforms must be linked to ongoing or nascent public sector reforms, in areas such as budget management, decentralization, and public administration reform, stimulated through information as a catalyst for change, and as an input to prod the success of other reforms.
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Harvard University1, World Health Organization2, University of Oxford3, New York University4, Cayetano Heredia University5, World Bank Institute6, National Institutes of Health7, World Bank8, University of Cape Town9, Makerere University10, University of Chile11, Thailand Ministry of Public Health12
TL;DR: This analysis of the global workforce proposes that mobilisation and strengthening of human resources for health, neglected yet critical, is central to combating health crises in some of the world's poorest countries and for building sustainable health systems in all countries.
1,402 citations
TL;DR: Estimates of ADHD prevalence and correlates in the World Health Organization World Mental Health Survey Initiative should be considered more seriously in future epidemiological and clinical studies than is currently the case.
Abstract: Background Little is known about the epidemiology of adult attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Aims To estimate the prevalence and correlates of DSM-IV adult ADHD in the World Health Organization World Mental Health Survey Initiative. Method An ADHD screen was administered to respondents aged 18-44 years in ten countries in the Americas, Europe and the Middle East (n=11422). Masked clinical reappraisal interviews were administered to 154 US respondents to calibrate the screen. Multiple imputation was used to estimate prevalence and correlates based on the assumption of cross-national calibration comparability. Results Estimates of ADHD prevalence averaged 3.4% (range 1.2-7.3%), with lower prevalence in lower-income countries (1.9%) compared with higher-income countries (4.2%). Adult ADHD often co-occurs with other DSM-IV disorders and is associated with considerable role disability. Few cases are treated for ADHD, but in many cases treatment is given for comorbid disorders. Conclusions Adult ADHD should be considered more seriously in future epidemiological and clinical studies than is currently the case.
1,219 citations
TL;DR: Surveys in which enumerators make unannounced visits to primary schools and health clinics in Bangladesh, Ecuador, India, Indonesia, Peru and Uganda and recorded whether they found teachers and health workers in the facilities are reported.
Abstract: In this paper, we report results from surveys in which enumerators make unannounced visits to primary schools and health clinics in Bangladesh, Ecuador, India, Indonesia, Peru and Uganda and recorded whether they found teachers and health workers in the facilities.
1,205 citations
TL;DR: The term social entrepreneurship is used to refer to the rapidly growing number of organizations that have created models for efficiently catering to basic human needs that existing markets and institutions have failed to satisfy as discussed by the authors.
1,032 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors provide a more direct test of the gender roles hypothesis by analyzing community epidemiological data collected from respondents surveyed in 15 countries as part of the World Health Organization (WHO) World Mental Health (WMH) Survey Initiative.
Abstract: Epidemiological surveys have consistently documented significantly higher rates of anxiety and mood disorders among women than men1, 2 and significantly higher rates of externalizing and substance use disorders among men than women.3–5 Although a number of biological, psychosocial, and biopsychosocial hypotheses have been proposed to account for these patterns,6–8 evidence that gender differences in depression9, 10 and substance use11–13 have narrowed in a number of countries has led to a special interest in the “gender roles” hypothesis. The latter asserts that gender differences in the prevalence of mental disorders are due to differences in the typical stressors, coping resources, and opportunity structures for expressing psychological distress made available differentially to women and men in different countries at different points in history.14, 15 Consistent with this hypothesis, evidence of decreasing gender differences in depression and substance use has been found largely in countries where the roles of women have improved in terms of opportunities for employment, access to birth control, and other indicators of increasing gender role equality, while trend studies in countries where gender roles have been more static11, 16 or over periods of historical time when gender role changes have been small17 have failed to document a reduction in gender differences in depression or substance use.
Most research aimed at investigating the gender roles hypothesis has focused on individual-level variation in roles in a single country at a single point in time.18–20 This approach is limited in three ways. First, selection bias into roles due to pre-existing mental illness (e.g., women with agoraphobia having a higher probability than other women of becoming homemakers rather than seeking employment outside the home) confounds attempts to evaluate the causal effects of gender roles. Second, gender differences are largely confined to differences in lifetime risk, with much less evidence for gender differences in recent prevalence among lifetime cases.21 This means that investigation of the determinants of gender difference should focus on lifetime first onset rather than on the recent prevalence that has been the focus of most studies. Third, as the gender roles hypothesis is a hypothesis about the effects of social context, a rigorous test of the hypothesis requires an analysis of societal-level time-space variation rather than analysis of the individual-level variation that has been the focus of most studies.
A small number of cross-national comparative studies have examined spatial variation in gender differences in depression22 and alcohol abuse13 at a point in time or, more rarely, at two points in time.11 Although these studies raised the possibility that gender roles might be associated with variation in the magnitude of gender differences in these outcomes, they were unable to test this hypothesis due to the small number of cross-sectional country-level observations included in the analyses. The current report provides a more direct test of the gender roles hypothesis by analyzing community epidemiological data collected from respondents surveyed in 15 countries as part of the World Health Organization (WHO) World Mental Health (WMH) Survey Initiative.21 Previous cross-national comparisons of gender differences in mental illness focused on cross-sectional differences. We, in comparison, use retrospective reports obtained in the WMH surveys about lifetime occurrence and age-of-onset of mental disorders in different birth cohorts to study time-space variation in lifetime risk. Specifically, we examine both variation across cohorts within a single country (i.e., temporal variation) and variation across countries within a single cohort (i.e., special variation) in lifetime risk of mental disorders as a function of time-space variation in the traditionality of gender roles. Lifetime risk is the focus rather than recent prevalence even though accuracy of reporting is doubtlessly better for recent episodes than lifetime occurrence in order to address the fact that gender differences in lifetime risk are much more robust than gender differences in current prevalence among lifetime cases
972 citations