A Time to Teach— and a Time to Learn

The USAID-funded flagship family planning service delivery project named Evidence to Action (E2A) worked from 2011 to 2021 to improve family planning and reproductive health for women and girls across seventeen nations in sub-Saharan Africa using a “scaling-up mindset.” The paper discusses three key lessons emerging from the project’s experience with applying ExpandNet’s systematic approach to scale up. The methodology uses ExpandNet/WHO’s scaling-up framework and guidance tools to design and implement pilot or demonstration projects in ways that look ahead to their future scale-up; develop a scaling-up strategy with local stakeholders; and then strategically manage the scaling-up process. The paper describes how a scaling-up mindset was engendered, first within the project’s technical team in Washington and then how they subsequently sought to build capacity at the country level to support scale-up work throughout E2A’s portfolio of activities. The project worked with local multi-stakeholder resource teams, often led by government officials, to equip them to lead the scale-up of family planning and health system strengthening interventions. Examples from project experience in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kenya, Nigeria, and Uganda illustrating key concepts are discussed. E2A also established a community of practice on systematic approaches to scale up as a platform for sharing learning across a variety of technical agencies engaged in scale-up work and to create learning opportunities for interacting with thought leaders around critical scale-up issues.

In October 2000, at an international meeting in Pretoria, South Africa, chaired by the World Health Organization (WHO), 45 delegates from Sub-Saharan Africa, Europe, and the United States discussed the results of the Healthy City project in the region and the possibilities for incorporating occupational safety, health, and hygiene items into the project. Working conditions play only a minor role in current Healthy City projects. This is partly the result of a low profile of occupational safety, health, and hygiene on political agendas, and partly a result of a lack of convincing demonstration projects. To tackle these points WHO will start two initiatives. First, a document for decision makers will be issued, to highlight the subject and bring it to the attention of local, national, and international bodies. Second, demonstration projects will be started, making use of the methods developed in the Work Improvement In Small Enterprises (WISE) projects and the experience of the Prevention and Control Exchange (PACE) project.

Urban transformation with TURAS open innovations; opportunities for transitioning through transdisciplinarity

Desertification is one of the major challenges facing humanity. However, there is no effective way to effectively control desertification. China is experiencing serious desertification, and to alleviate this trend, China has implemented a series of major ecological projects since 1978 and has achieved good results. Remote sensing can record changes in surface processes over a long period of time and can play an active role in desertification monitoring and governance. However, there is no systematic remote sensing monitoring method for desertification. In response to this problem, this paper takes a demonstration and reconstruction project of the United Nations desertification in the Kubuqi Desert in China as an example. By using the 30-year time series Landsat data, we propose a new remote sensing monitoring method for the impact of ecological restoration engineering of desert to monitor the spatial and temporal evolution pattern of the Kubuqi Desert in the past 30 years and the impact of the human ecological reconstruction project on the location of land use types in the Kubuqi Desert. In addition, the method analyzes the impact of the Kubuqi Desert Reconstruction Project on the local ecological environment changes from time and space perspectives. The results show the following: (1) During 1991–2017, the Kubuqi Desert Reconstruction Project improved the cultivated land, afforestation, and the Yellow River Drainage to control the sand and in conjunction with other renovation projects improved the ecological environment. The area of the sandy land decreased from 45.76% to 28.66%, while the areas of the waters wetland and artificial forest (shrub), urban construction land, and agricultural land increased; (2) There are obvious time and space differences in the transformation, and the vegetation cover increases as a whole. The obvious change areas are mainly distributed in the riverbank irrigation area of the Yellow River section of the Kubuqi Desert and the torrents such as the Maobula Kong, Buer Taigou and Heilaigou and other mountain gully areas. The relevant experience of the Kubuqi Desert Reconstruction Project in China has important reference significance for world desertification transformation.

Case management services for adolescent substance abusers: A program description

<div class="htmlview paragraph">A long-term thermal energy storage system has been implemented at the University of Utrecht campus in the Netherlands. The project will extend co-generation operation into the summer beyond heat demand periods, resulting in increased electricity generation. The stored heat (90 °C) is used in winter for space heating of several university buildings. In this demonstration project experience is being gained, among others, with groundwater treatment and flow-rate control in an aquifer thermal energy plant.</div> <div class="htmlview paragraph">The storage system has been in full operation since May 13, 1991. In this paper a short review is presented of the technical problems that were met during the design stage and one year of operation.</div> <div class="htmlview paragraph">The general conclusion is that during the first operational period too much water had been treated so that there was a risk of clay-swelling. This problem was caused by a technical failure of the spit-control for water treatment. Since the control system has been altered the high temperature ATES has been functioning perfectly.</div>