•COVID-19 is reversing gains made in the sexual and reproductive health response.•Women and girls’ sexual and reproductive health services must remain essential.•Civil society organisations can ...safeguard sexual and reproductive health amid crisis.•Civil society organisations must promote better accountability by African governments.
This article outlines the role of African civil society in safeguarding gains registered to date in sexual and reproductive health and the response to HIV. The case is made for why civil society organizations (CSOs) must be engaged vigilantly in the COVID-19 response in Africa. Lockdown disruptions and the rerouting of health funds to the pandemic have impeded access to essential sexual and reproductive health (SRH) and social protection services. Compounded by pre-existing inequalities faced by vulnerable populations, the poor SRH outcomes amid COVID-19 call for CSOs to intensify demand for the accountability of governments. CSOs should also continue to persevere in their aim to rapidly close community-health facility gaps and provide safety nets to mitigate the gendered impact of COVID-19.
Since the early 1970s, as part of India’s developmentalist agenda, a number of hydropower dams have been built in Manipur, the country’s north-eastern-most State bordering Myanmar. However, none of ...the mega-dams built in the State have proven to be effective and fully functional today. Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) have been vocal in their opposition to mega-dams due to their negative effects on the environment and the livelihood security of local populations. Based on secondary data, historical antecedents, personal field information, and observable facts, this paper indicates that the Indian state’s developmentalist approach begun in Manipur is roughly analogous to the western development model initiated during the cold war period. Despite overwhelming proof of Manipur’s mega-dam failure, the Centre refuses to admit it and ignores CSO demands, and the failed mega-dams are unlikely to be decommissioned due to the Centre’s clandestine objective. The hanger-on approach of several CSO leaders and local political figures who are subservient to the Centre’s high command has gradually delegitimised and politicised genuine dam campaigns in Manipur.
•A novel scheme was proposed for automated seizure detection using electroencephalography (EEG).•Subbands and cumulative sum of subbands were raised and their effect was investigated.•12 cases were ...studied and accuracies of nearly 100% and 93.62% for the first 11 and 12th cases, respectively.
We here proposed a novel fusion method of frequency slice wavelet transform (FSWT)-based fuzzy entropy (FuzzyEn) and Higuchi’s fractal dimension (HFD), t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (t-SNE) and K-nearest neighbor (KNN) to achieve the goal of automated detection of epileptic electroencephalography (EEG). Fifteen EEG subbands were first separated from the original EEG via FSWT, then their cumulative sum of subbands (CSoS) including forward CSoS and backward CSoS were computed. FuzzyEn and HFD were then employed to quantify the nonlinear properties of these subbands and CSoS, and followed by mapping the high-dimensional features into the two-dimensional space using t-SNE. Finally, the two-dimensional features were fed into KNN for classification. Eight binary-class, three ternary-class and one quinary-class cases, in total twelve classification tasks of the Bonn EEG database were conducted. The proposed approach attained accuracies of approximately 100% and 93.62% in the first 11 and 12th cases, respectively. Experimental results not only manifest our proposal is superior to most of existing methods, but also demonstrate subbands and CSoS based nonlinear features enhance the performance of epileptic seizure detection.
Two for One Fröhlich, Christian; Skokova, Yulia
Voluntas (Manchester, England),
08/2020, Letnik:
31, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Civil societies are usually seen as facilitators of democracy or as oppositional powers withstanding authoritarian rule. However, more and more often civil society organizations (CSOs) appear to ...contribute to the legitimacy of non-democratic incumbents. Taking the example of contemporary Russia, this paper argues that state funding for CSOs under authoritarian regime conditions serves for securing regime legitimacy in two respects—by supporting CSOs contribution to public welfare and by transmitting state-led legitimacy discourse to the civil society sector. The analysis of applications submitted between 2013 and 2016 to the Presidential Grant Competition (PGC), the biggest public funding programme for CSOs in Russia, shows that the state is (1) supporting CSO activities above all in social, health and education-related fields, and (2) privileging projects that relate to a state-led conservative public discourse not only but foremost within those welfare-related fields. These results highlight the importance of investigating state support to CSOs in order to access the changing role of civil society under authoritarian regime conditions.
In Ghana, civil society organizations (CSOs) play significant roles in promoting democratic development. However, the space within which they operate is increasingly becoming restricted. Coupled with ...this, COVID-19 inspired legislations are disrupting civil society, increasing existing threats to civic space, and creating uncertainties for Ghana's 2020 elections. Yet, our understanding of how the COVID-19 pandemic influences civic space and elections remains limited. Drawing on media reviews and 22 semi-structured interviews with CSO representatives and key informants, we find that the pandemic poses threats to civic space in terms of curtailment of freedoms of expression, movement and peaceful assembly. We also demonstrate that while the COVID-19 pandemic created uncertainties with the processes leading to the 2020 general elections, it had minimal effects on the elections due in part to the proactiveness and preparedness of the Electoral Commission in election administration. Notwithstanding, our findings show that the pandemic heightened and created opportunities for promoting polarized online campaigns characterized by hate speech and the propagation of fake news as political parties resorted to the use of social media in reaching out to voters. This undermines efforts for promoting democratic development and open civic space. Implications of the research findings are discussed.
Efforts to address human trafficking require a multi-faceted approach. The “3-P” index outlined in the U.N. protocol on human trafficking highlights the importance of prosecuting criminals, ...protecting survivors, and preventing the crime. In addition to states, civil society organizations (CSOs) play a crucial role in fighting this issue. Cooperation between the state and CSOs is increasingly recognized as a vital strategy for combatting human trafficking. Does the consulting of CSOs by policymakers affect outcomes in prosecution, protection, and prevention? Using data from an original data set of 183 countries, my findings suggest that cooperation significantly influences prosecution and prevention efforts, but not protection efforts. I theorize that this is because there are low technical and political costs to implement prosecution and prevention policies, but high technical and political costs to implement protection policies. Furthermore, I argue that CSO consultation is more likely to be associated with shallow, rather than deep, policy changes.
The growing role of civil society organizations (CSOs) in welfare service provision is sometimes portrayed as a threat to welfare state universalism in Nordic societies. In Finland, CSOs co-produce ...integration services alongside comprehensive official integration programmes, compensating for gaps and shortcomings in those services. We identify three “gaps”, which are (1) limited availability of services in terms of time and target group, (2) lack of direct labour market contacts and (3) limited flexibility to serve individual needs. We assess how CSOs target these gaps with their service offerings through qualitative interviews with policy implementers, CSO workers and migrants. However, CSOs’ role in labour market integration is inherently limited by their services being small scale, short term and project based. We find that due to their independence and limited role, CSOs operate synergistically with official services, extending rather than undermining universalism.
Indigenous civil society organisations (CSOs) are receiving a larger proportion of international aid than ever before. The international community supplies them with financial support owing to the ...belief that they can effectively mediate between disputant communities. The impact of this situation attracts scholarly debate. Whereas scholars traditionally assert that recipients transform into service-delivery organisations tied to the interests of their donors, some allege that CSOs retain the agency to negotiate how funds are spent in accordance with their own priorities. By focusing on Cypriot peacebuilding CSOs, I add further nuance to this debate. I argue that international aid enables CSOs to carry out peacebuilding initiatives according to their underlying agenda, owing to several contextual factors, providing they adhere to donors’ expectations and restrictions. International aid cannot therefore be reduced to having a solely positive or negative impact – a more complex picture emerges, to some degree suiting both donors and CSOs.
This research explores accountability to beneficiaries within Civil Society Organisations (CSOs). Conceptualised as “downward”, this direction of accountability is of increasing research interest, ...given that beneficiaries are impacted by the mission of a CSO. However, the concept of downward accountability is used almost unanimously across CSO forms which cover a diverse array of organisational qualities, structures, missions, and people. This suggests downward accountability to be an encompassing concept, amenable to diversity among CSO forms; but is this the case? Is downward accountability the same across CSO forms and if not, how does the CSO form impact downward accountability? To respond to these questions, this research examines downward accountability across and within three CSO forms in Australia: public philanthropic foundation, service provider, and cooperative. Findings from 48 interviews suggest while there are clear differences in downward accountability relationships, mechanisms, and motivations across the three CSO forms examined, the impact of these different CSO forms upon the conception of downward accountability is minimal, where downward accountability displays similar characteristics across these forms. The insights gained contribute to problematising the concept of downward accountability, thereby providing a more sophisticated and nuanced understanding of a complex phenomenon.
The present study aims to provide a conceptual framework to help practitioners to improve the quality of recreational waters near estuary, which may be affected by untreated wastewater from Combined ...Sewer Overflows (CSOs). When CSOs are activated, the concentration of bacteria (e.g., Enterococci and E. coli) in estuary increases, thereby resulting in a potential health threat to swimmers. Here, the bacterial exposure is evaluated using physically-based stochastic model for contaminant transport, while human health risk is determined by Quantitative Microbial Risk Assessment (QMRA). Based on human health risk framework, we quantify the Carrying Capacity (CC) of the recreational water body. Such an indicator is defined as the number of swimming individuals that can be sustained in a beach resort with an acceptable risk threshold. The CC increases by dilution processes and by reduction of the source concentration, which in turn depends on the improvements in the sewage system. The presented approach can be a useful screening tool for policy-makers and other stakeholders, thereby providing a potential solution to the trade-off between economic development and the sustainable ecosystem in coastal areas.
Display omitted
•Physically-based screening tool for health risk in a recreational marine site•Stochastic model to assess the risk related to microbial exposure using QMRA•Influence of sewage-impacted rivers on bathing water quality•Effect of different weather conditions on beach resort management
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