Low-income countries with high Tuberculosis burden have few reference laboratories able to perform TB culture. In 2006, the Zanzibar National TB Control Programme planned to decentralize TB diagnostics. The Italian Cooperation Agency with the scientific support of the "L. Spallanzani" National Institute for Infectious Diseases sustained the project through the implementation of a TB reference l...

Market Imperfections and Firm-Sponsored Training Recent human capital theories predict that labor market frictions and product market competition influence firm-sponsored training. Using matched worker-firm data from Dutch manufacturing, our paper empirically assesses the validity of these predictions. We find that a decrease in labor market frictions significantly reduces firms’ training expen...

PROBLEM Voluntary counselling and testing (VCT) data from the registered sites in Kenya have been fraught with challenges, leading to insufficient statistics in the national office for planning purposes. An exercise was carried out to determine the barriers to the flow of data in VCT sites in Kenya. APPROACH A record-based survey was conducted at 332 VCT sites in Kenya. Data from on-site reco...

Skill Policies for Scotland This paper argues that skill formation is a life-cycle process and develops the implications of this insight for Scottish social policy. Families are major producers of skills, and a successful policy needs to promote effective families and to supplement failing ones. We present evidence that early disadvantages produce severe later disadvantages that are hard to rem...

The virtual physiological human (VPH) initiative encompasses a wide range of activities, including structural and functional imaging, data mining, knowledge discovery tool and database development, biomedical modelling, simulation and visualization. The VPH community is developing from a multitude of relatively focused, but disparate, research endeavours into an integrated effort to bring toget...

The aim of this study is to investigate primary school teachers‘ opinions in relation to inservice training (INSET) programs via distance education. The subjects of this study were primary school teachers (n=70) working in the city center of Bolu-Turkey in the spring semester of 2006–2007 academic year. During the study, the qualitative data were collected through semi-structured interviews hel...

The Central African Field Epidemiology and Laboratory Training Program (CAFELTP) is a 2-year public health leadership capacity building training program. It was established in October 2010 to enhance capacity for applied epidemiology and public health laboratory services in three countries: Cameroon, Central African Republic, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The aim of the program is to de...

INTRODUCTION The Job Training Partnership Act (JTPA), enacted in 1982 as a major initiative of the Reagan Administration, created what became a $5 billion federally-funded employment and training program for disadvantaged workers. 1 The JTPA directs the states to provide services to “those who can benefit from, and are most in need of, such opportunities” and requires that the results “be measu...

Performance management systems that provide (relatively) quick feedback to program operators play an important role in employment and training programs around the world. This paper brings together evidence on the effects of such systems, drawn primarily from the widely studied U.S. Job Training Partnership Act (JTPA) program. The questions addressed include the effects of performance standards ...