After a 30-year hiatus, large-scale irrigation projects have returned to the development agenda in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). However, magnitude and drivers of past schemes’ performance remains poorly understood. We quantify performance, measured as proportion proposed irrigated area delivered, 79 schemes from across SSA by comparing planning documents with estimates current scheme size satellit...

A pilot study is one of the essential stages in a research project. This paper aims to describe the importance of and steps involved in executing a pilot study by using an example of a descriptive study in primary care. The process of testing the feasibility of the project proposal, recruitment of subjects, research tool and data analysis was reported. We conclude that a pilot study is necessar...

"This article reviews the experience of two pilot projects in Bangladesh that have addressed the question of how [operations] research can be designed to foster its utilization. In a rural field experiment [begun in 1972] in Matlab subdistrict, research has demonstrated that contraceptive services, if carefully designed and properly implemented, can influence demographic dynamics even where so...

One of the key roles of a junior doctor is co-ordinating the care of their patients and communicating with different departments or specialties within the hospital. To do this, junior doctors often spend a lot of time on a daily basis contacting the hospital switchboard in order to locate a required bleep/extension/fax number, or trying to navigate an intranet based directory which can be diffi...

BACKGROUND Community service-learning (CSL) has been proposed as one way to enrich medical and dental students' sense of social responsibility toward people who are marginalized in society. AIM We developed and implemented a new CSL option in the integrated medical/dental curriculum and assessed its educational impact. METHODS Focus groups, individual open-ended interviews, and a survey wer...