Health promoting schools: initiatives in Africa
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to describe the rationale for and potential of World Health Organization (WHO) health promoting schools (HPS) in Africa. Design/methodology/approach - Overview of the related literature and presentations at the 2011 Stellenbosch international colloquium on HPS relating to sub-Saharan Africa. Findings - Schools provide the most efficient and effective way to reach large portions of the population; however, no literature reporting evaluations of HPS from Africa existed ten years ago. The WHO now supports HPS strategies in over 32 African countries, recognizing that the burden of disease, disability and premature death is disproportionately high in the region, and that many of the causes are preventable. Novel applications of the WHO model are increasing; those applicable to Africa include: measures to address the widespread problem of poor oral health, hygiene and nutrition among children; a range of "entry point" activities to initiate HPS with validated evaluation methodology; initiatives centered on gardening relevant for sub-Saharan Africa; opportunities for cross-disciplinary learning opportunities generated by inter-sectoral collaborative HPS programs; and the use of social media and cell phone messaging to deliver health promotion to at-risk teen populations on the continent. Challenges include the need for multi-sectoral collaboration and Ministry leadership, paucity of human resources and stable funding and limited research and evaluation of best practices. Practical implications - Africa faces significant challenges educating the next generation in the context of health. Strong political action, broad participation and sustained advocacy are required to capitalize on the proven potential of novel initiatives now available to disseminate "knowledge" and "healthy practices" through the WHO HPS model. Originality/value - Use of HPS offers a flexible and inexpensive avenue of relevance where guidelines and process exist, and evidence of efficacy in Africa is accumulating.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.014 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.018 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".