This title makes a substantial contribution to our understanding of the many risks and vulnerability faced by orphans and the ameliorating role played by the actions of governments and donors.

This guidebook is a collection of stories of African development projects that have transformed the lives of individuals and communities through collaborative partnerships. Through the study of these successful collaborations, readers will learn to: - Engage in capacity-building for collective problem-solving at the community level. - Work collaboratively for women's empowerment. - Mobilize culturally diverse communities to plan, implement, and evaluate sustainable community development. - Build meaningful collaborations among university and grassroots partners. - Maximize volunteer skills and match them to community needs. The Women's Global Connection (WGC; www.womensglobalconnection.org) embarked on this journey of cross-cultural engagement and capacity-building with one intention, grounded on three pillars: - Local ownership demanded individual and community involvement and buy-in. - Social empowerment required that each of our endeavors resulted in the local community's capacity to share the knowledge and replicate the training that was offered. - The promise of sustainability curbed our efforts to engage only in projects that held the hope of long-term sustainability by the community itself. Years of collaboration among the women's cooperatives, WGC, a private Catholic university, and countless volunteers has demonstrated the unbounded potential of reaching across boundaries and barriers to build a more responsible sense of global citizenship in today's inequitable world society.

Conflicts and the HIV-AIDS pandemic are generating a major humanitarian crisis in Sub-Saharan Africa: the number of children who have lost one or both parents is expected to rise to 35 million by 2010. Even prior to the death of parents, children are vulnerable as prolonged sickness of a parent robs them of their childhood, often forcing them to become breadwinners. The risk of orphanhood is no longer a random shock affecting a few families; it is a systemic shock affecting whole communities and large segments of the population.

Social protection is an increasingly important part of the social policy dialogue in Africa, and yet because of its relatively new place in a rapidly evolving agenda, evidence on critical design choices such as targeting, and on impacts of social protection interventions, is mostly limited to case studies or small, unrepresentative surveys. This impressive collection makes a major contribution to building the evidence base, drawing on rigorous analysis of social protection programmes in several African countries, as well as original research and thinking on key topical issues in the social protection discourse. Social Protection for Africa’s Children is divided into four parts. The first presents economic and human-rights based right arguments for social protection as an integral part of the social policy menu in Africa. This is followed by a part on targeting, which highlights some of the key policy trade-offs faced when deciding between alternative target groups. The third part presents rigorous quantitative evidence on the impact of social cash transfers on children from programmes in South Africa, Malawi and Ethiopia and the final part addresses a set of issues related to social justice and human rights. This book significantly advances existing knowledge about social protection for children in Africa, both conceptually and empirically. It makes a strong case for social protection interventions that address the short term (amelioration) and long term (structural) needs of children, and shows that programming in this sector for children is both feasible and achievable. Policy makers and practitioners in this sector will have, in this book, the theoretical and empirical evidence necessary to advance social protection for Africa’s children in the decades to come. Furthermore, this book should be an essential resource to postgraduates and students focussing on development economics in Africa.

By 2010, there will be 25 million AIDS orphans. Left alone, they will be ripe candidates for radicalization and exploitation by dictators and terrorists, and civilization will deteriorate to an unrecognizable point. Each chapter provides links to organizations that are working on solutions to this problem.

​Increasingly, global humanitarian efforts are focusing on improving the lives of children. And among the developing world, the African nations are particularly affected by extreme weather conditions, devastating pandemics, and armed conflict. Neurocognitive science offers significant avenues toward bringing needed aid to the continent while creating a template for helping children worldwide. The studies in Neuropsychology of Children in Africa clearly illustrate how the brain develops and adjusts in the face of adversity. Contributors span assessment approaches and public health risk factors, and represent established topics and emerging lines of research, including biocultural constructs and genomic technologies. Together, these chapters argue for methodology that is culturally sensitive, scientifically rigorous, consistent, and sustainable. And although the focus is pediatric, the book takes a lifespan approach to prevention and intervention, modeling a universal framework for understanding neurocognitive development. Included in the coverage: Assessment of very young children in Africa in the context of HIV. Psychosocial aspects of malnutrition among African children. Assessment of neuropsychological outcomes in pediatric severe malaria. Neurodisability screening using the Ten Questions questionnaire. The neuropsychology of sickle cell disease in West African children. Computerized Cognitive Rehabilitation Thera py for African children. As a guide to current findings or a springboard for new studies, Neuropsychology of Children in Africa is a necessary reference for researchers, policymakers, and diverse professionals in global aid organizations, and across the discipline.