The change-makers of West Africa.

West Africa was the focus of global attention during the Ebola virus disease outbreak, when systemic health system weaknesses compounded a serious emergency and complicated response efforts. Following the crisis, calls were made to strengthen health systems, but investments to date have fallen short of delivering the support needed to build strong health systems able to prevent and manage future outbreaks.In part, this reality serves to highlight the shortcomings of the solutions being repeatedly prioritised by external funders and experts, solutions that often fail to consider the wealth of West African evidence and actors actively working to strengthen the leadership and health systems needed to drive and sustainably improve national health outcomes.

The fallacy of coverage: uncovering disparities to improve immunization rates through evidence. Results from the Canadian International Immunization Initiative Phase 2 - Operational Research Grants.

Immunization can and does save lives. However, the presence of vaccines does not easily translate into every child being vaccinated, and this is what the studies in this journal supplement reveal. From South Asia to West Africa,the evidence presented here reveals what we are calling the fallacy of coverage, going beyond uncovering the real vaccination rates to providing evidence on the reasons for the lack of effective coverage.

Evidence-based training of frontline health workers for door-to-door health promotion: a pilot randomized controlled cluster trial with Lady Health Workers in Sindh Province, Pakistan.

Objective: Demonstrate the effective use of community-based evidence for health promotion by Lady Health Workers (LHWs) in Sindh, Pakistan.

Methods: A baseline study on mothers and children provided local evidence for risk communication tools designed and tested by LHWs. The communities were randomized to intervention and control.

Reduction of inequalities in health: assessing evidence-based tools.

Background: The reduction of health inequalities is a focus of many national and international health organisations. The need for pragmatic evidence-based approaches has led to the development of a number of evidence-based equity initiatives. This paper describes a new program that focuses upon evidence- based tools, which are useful for policy initiatives that reduce inequities.

Coordinating Canada's research response to global health challenges: the Global Health Research Initiative.

The Global Health Research Initiative (GHRI) involving the Canadian International Development Agency, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Health Canada and the International Development Research Centre seeks to coordinate Canada's research response to global health challenges. In light of numerous calls to action both nationally and internationally, an orientation to applied health policy and systems research, and to public health research and its application is required to redress global inequalities in wealth and health and to tackle well-documented constraints to achieving the United Nations Millennium Development Goals. Over the last four years, the GHRI has funded close to 70 research program development and pilot projects.

National cross sectional study of views on sexual violence and risk of HIV infection and AIDS among South African school pupils.

Objective: To investigate the views of school pupils on sexual violence and on the risk of HIV infection and AIDS and their experiences of sexual violence.

Design: National cross sectional study.

Setting: 5162 classes in 1418 South African schools.