Cosmas Desmond
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 333381 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Cosmas Desmond |
| NOMBRES | Cosmas |
| APELLIDO | Desmond |
| FIRMA | DESMOND C |
| AFILIACIONES | University of KwaZulu-Natal |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3500-0196 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 42 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 10 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 42 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1972 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 2 |
Estimating the human development impacts and economic returns from an adolescent cash ‘plus’ programme in Kenya
The Government of Kenya plans to scale-up an adolescent-focused cash ‘plus’ programme to improve educational attainment and prevent adolescent pregnancy. We aimed to estimate the programme’s impacts, economic returns, and cost-effectiveness using model-based economic evaluation. We modelled the delivery of conditional cash transfers ‘plus’ adolescent clubs, community conversations, parenting support and psychosocial support to poor adolescents in…
When low benefit-cost ratios mean we need to invest more, not less
Economic evaluations such as Benefit-Cost Analysis (BCA) are often used to guide priority setting. However, in adverse contexts, low benefit-cost ratios (BCR) are often not evidence of weak interventions, but reflections of structural barriers. We should therefore invest more in these cases, to tackle these barriers, rather than less
Early transition markers, opportunities, and limitations that define pathways into the labour market from adolescence to adulthood in South Africa
Intimate Partner Violence and Determinants of HIV Seroconversion among Female Caregivers in Kwazulu-Natal, South Africa
Accelerating achievement for Africa’s adolescents
By 2050, one in four people in the world will live in Africa. The region’s adolescents are our present and future but need effective services to support their holistic health and wellbeing, advance their education, allow them to flourish, and protect them from adversity. This paper reviews evidence for a new concept of ‘development accelerators’: interventions that can help achieve multiple Sustainable Development Goals simultaneously. Across 26 …
Determinants of school dropout in the Asenze cohort study in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa
South Africa remains characterised by high rates of school dropout, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. The consequences lead to compromised employment opportunities and other negative social and health outcomes associated with out of school youth (OSY). Persistently high dropout rates have prompted calls for more evidence on their underlying causes, to inform interventions that support school retention in South Africa. Data for this paper come…
Girls' schooling is important but insufficient to promote equality for boys and girls in childhood and across the life course
Whole of government approaches to accelerate adolescent success
The multiple domains of development covered by the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) present a practical challenge for governments. This is particularly acute in highly resource-constrained settings which use a sector-by-sector approach to structure financing and prioritization. One potentially under-prioritized solution is to implement interventions with the potential to simultaneously improve multiple outcomes across sectors, what United Nat…
Addressing unmet social needs for improved maternal and child nutrition
Maternal and child malnutrition persists globally, despite existing healthcare and social protection systems. Socio-economic disadvantages contribute to high malnutrition rates, particularly in poor urban communities where many disadvantaged mothers cannot fully benefit from services. To address these disparities, a novel social needs framework has been proposed, emphasising the importance of addressing individuals' unmet needs to enhance the ben…
Identifying pregnant and postpartum women’s priorities for enhancing nutrition support through social needs programmes in a resource-constrained urban community in South Africa
Women expressed strong views about which programmes should be prioritised to support mothers and pregnant women in addressing their social needs and improving nutrition. Key areas included providing support with job searching and entrepreneurship, accessing childcare and the healthy foods recommended at clinics, as well as finding information on available community and government services. Leveraging multisectoral collaboration, aligned policy ob…
Investing in human development and building state resilience in fragile contexts
Maternal and early malnutrition have negative health and developmental impacts over the life-course. Consequently, early nutrition support can provide significant benefits into later life, provided the later life contexts allow. This study examines the limits of siloed investments in nutrition and illustrates how ignoring life-course contextual constraints limits human development benefits and exacerbates inequality, particularly in fragile conte…
Assessing the cost-effectiveness of economic strengthening and parenting support for preventing violence against adolescents in Mpumalanga Province, South Africa
There is limited evidence around the cost-effectiveness of interventions to reduce violence against children in low- and middle-income countries. We used a decision-analytic model to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of three intervention scenarios for reducing adolescent emotional, physical, and sexual abuse in Mpumalanga Province, South Africa. The intervention scenarios were: 1) Community grant outreach to link households to South Africa’s Child…
Measuring the cost-effectiveness of a home-visiting intervention to promote early child development among rural families linked to the Rwandan social protection system
Early childhood development (ECD) programmes are heralded as a way to improve children’s health and educational outcomes. However, few studies in developing countries calculate the effectiveness of quality early childhood interventions. This study estimates the cost and cost-effectiveness of the Sugira Muryango (SM) trial, a home-visiting intervention to improve ECD outcomes through positive parent-child relationships. Cost-effectiveness analysis…
Is hope associated with HIV-acquisition risk and intimate partner violence amongst young women and men? A cross-sectional study in urban informal settlements in South Africa
Hope is a concept that may mediate between the structural constraints people live under and their HIV-acquisition risk behaviours/experiences. Drawing on data collected as the baseline for an intervention trial between September 2015 and September 2016, among young (18-30-year-old), out-of-school women and men in urban informal settlements in Durban, South Africa, we assess whether hope, assessed by the Snyder Hope Scale, is associated with HIV-r…
Triple Benefit
We conducted a programmatic, observational cohort study with mother-infant pairs (MIPs) enrolled in prevention-of-mother-to-child-transmission (PMTCT) programs in Malawi to assess the feasibility and potential HIV-related benefits of integrating Early Childhood Development (ECD) services into PMTCT programs. Six health facilities were included in the intervention. We offered ECD counseling from the WHO/UNICEF Care for Child Development package in…
A conceptual framework and exploratory model for health and social intervention acceptability among African adolescents and youth
Intervention acceptability has become an increasingly key consideration in the development, evaluation and implementation of health and social interventions. However, to date this area of investigation has been constrained by the absence of a consistent definition of acceptability, comprehensive conceptual frameworks disaggregating its components, and few reliable assessment measures. This paper aims to contribute to this gap, by proposing a conc…
First 1,000 days
BACKGROUND: Child cognitive development is often compromised in contexts of poverty and adversity, and these deficits tend to endure and affect the child across the life course. In the conditions of poverty and violence that characterise many low- and middle-income countries (LMIC), the capacity of parents to provide the kind of care that promotes good child development may be severely compromised, especially where caregivers suffer from depressi…
Association between caregiver and household alcohol use and child behavior problems in KwaZulu Natal, South Africa
Other people’s children and the critical role of the social service workforce
Understanding the needs of your child is complicated. Understanding the varied needs of a population of children with whom you have no direct contact is the near impossible challenge policy makers, government planners and donors face when making policy or selecting interventions to fund and implement. They cannot unpack children’s individual needs and so must predict what is most important for a given population and which services to prioritise. …
Realising the potential human development returns to investing in early and maternal nutrition
The benefits of interventions which improve early nutrition are well recognised. These benefits, however, only accrue to the extent that later life circumstances allow. Consequently, in adverse contexts many of the benefits will never be realised, particularly for the most vulnerable, exacerbating inequality. Returns to investment in early nutrition could be improved if we identified contextual factors constraining their realisation and intervent…
Storying ourselves
Mindful of 2020’s global focus on questions of systemic racism, this article looks at the continuing salience of the South African activist Steve Biko’s ideas about Black Consciousness and consciousness-raising as they impact young people’s empowerment in African countries. In the context of the UK Research and Innovation Global Challenges Research Fund (UKRI GCRF) Accelerate Hub (2019–24), a project exploring interventions in adolescents’ lives …
Prevalence and number of children living in institutional care
Modelling the impact of maternal HIV on uninfected children
A mathematical model, populated primarily with data from South Africa, was developed to model the numbers of children affected by maternal HIV, and the number who will experience long-term negative developmental consequences. A micro-simulation model generated two scenarios. The first simulated a cohort of women whose HIV status mimicked that of a target population, and mother-child dyads by way of age- and disease-specific fertility rates. Facto…
Catch-up growth in height and cognitive function
Cognitive and Language Development at Age 4–6 Years in Children HIV‐Exposed But Uninfected Compared to Those HIV‐Unexposed and to Children Living With HIV
Perinatal HIV infection is associated with delayed neurocognitive development, but less is known about children perinatally HIV-exposed but uninfected (CHEU). We compared cognitive and language outcomes in 4-6-year old CHEU versus children HIV-unexposed and uninfected (CHUU) and children living with HIV (CLHIV). We enrolled 1,581 children (77% of the child population) in five communities in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Children completed: Grover-…
The hidden battle
The AIDS epidemic will cause significant increases in illness and death in prime‐age adults, which will manifest itself through negative social, economic and developmental impacts. The epidemics economic impacts at the household level are decreased income, increased health‐care costs, decreased productive capacity and changing expenditure patterns. Three coping strategies are observed: altering household composition; withdrawing savings or sellin…
Storying ourselves
Mindful of 2020’s global focus on questions of systemic racism, this article looks at the continuing salience of the South African activist Steve Biko’s ideas about Black Consciousness and consciousness-raising as they impact young people’s empowerment in African countries. In the context of the UK Research and Innovation Global Challenges Research Fund (UKRI GCRF) Accelerate Hub (2019–24), a project exploring interventions in adolescents’ lives …
A conceptual framework and exploratory model for health and social intervention acceptability among African adolescents and youth
Intervention acceptability has become an increasingly key consideration in the development, evaluation and implementation of health and social interventions. However, to date this area of investigation has been constrained by the absence of a consistent definition of acceptability, comprehensive conceptual frameworks disaggregating its components, and few reliable assessment measures. This paper aims to contribute to this gap, by proposing a conc…
Covid-19
Covid-19 infections and related illness and death are rightly at the forefront of our minds. It is critical that we consider how to reduce infections, treat those who are ill and protect health systems. We must, however, also consider how the pandemic is affecting the families of those infected, and how interventions to prevent the spread of the virus come with large negative economic and social consequences. We must begin to identify the ways in…
The Discarded People, an Account of African Resettlement in South Africa
The Discarded People
Modernizing Racial Dominance
Sanctions and South Africa
This article sets out to describe and analyse the causes and effects of the phenomenal growth in the South African divestment campaign and the increasing calls for sanctions in the United States and other parts of the world. The campaign in the US for the divestment of holdings by universities, churches, cities and States in companies with South African interests and for the ending of bank loans is by no means new. Church and other groups have be…
The hidden battle
The AIDS epidemic will cause significant increases in illness and death in prime‐age adults, which will manifest itself through negative social, economic and developmental impacts. The epidemics economic impacts at the household level are decreased income, increased health‐care costs, decreased productive capacity and changing expenditure patterns. Three coping strategies are observed: altering household composition; withdrawing savings or sellin…
The social and economic impact of HIV/Aids in poor countries
This review accompanies the Guidelines for Preparation and Execution of Studies of the Social and Economic Impact of HIV/AIDS. Its purpose is to supplement and complement those practical guidelines by presenting some of the literature which informed their development. The first section of the review provides some background to the epidemic and an indication of where on the World Wide Web up to date information may be found. This complements the b…
Evidence of Aids mortality from an alternative source
This paper explores a way of measuring AIDS mortality in the absence of vital registration. It looks at the death notices in the major daily newspaper in Swaziland, The Times of Swaziland, and asks if these can be analysed to give a picture of changing mortality. It shows how clear trends can be discerned
Using an undertaker's data to assess changing patterns of mortality and their consequences in Swaziland
This paper measures AIDS mortality using routinely collected data from one of two nationally operating undertakers in Swaziland. The business recorded a marked increase in the number of deaths it handled between 1998 and 2002, most obvious in the 0-4 and 20-49 age categories. Cost data reflects this increase in mortality. Prices for funerals and coffins have declined in real terms. Recorded causes of death were of little use in determining the ex…
Targeting Aids orphans and child-headed households? A perspective from national surveys in South Africa, 1995–2005
In the HIV and AIDS sphere, children remain on the margins with respect to advocacy, prevention, treatment and care. Moreover, concern is generally limited to specific categories of children, most especially children living with HIV, orphaned children and child-headed households. Excluded from view are the very large numbers of children affected by generalized HIV/AIDS epidemics, now in advanced stages, in already impoverished countries in southe…
Relative Response
The aim of this article is to support efforts to hold governments accountable for their commitments to respond to HIV and AIDS. It describes a new approach to ranking countries' responses in order to facilitate cross-country comparisons. The method uses the United Nations General/Assembly Speecial Session on HIV/AIDS (UNGASS) Declaration of Commitment as its point of departure and was designed to rank countries in terms of their efforts to fight …
Strengthening families to support children affected by HIV and Aids
This paper provides an overview of the arguments for the central role of families, defined very broadly, and we emphasise the importance of efforts to strengthen families to support children affected by HIV and AIDS. We draw on work conducted in the Joint Learning Initiative on Children and AIDS's Learning Group 1: Strengthening Families, as well as published data and empirical literature to provide the rationale for family strengthening. We clos…
Consequences of HIV for children
The HIV/AIDS epidemic has many serious consequences for children. These consequences are, however, rarely inevitable. Families can provide a protective barrier that deflects blows, or minimises their impact and a supportive nurturing environment that can help children recover from harm. If strong enough, and with sufficient access to quality services and support from communities, families can reduce the impacts of HIV/AIDS on children to negligib…
Affording Support in the Response to the Welfare Needs of Children Affected by Aids
Costs and care
While it does not cost a great deal to make a difference in the life of a child living in poverty, that does not mean that they are cheap to care for. To avoid confusion there is a need to distinguish between expenditures on care, marginal costs of care and total cost of care. Expenditures on children are the amounts of money spent on their care. The marginal cost of care is the cost of achieving a specific increase in the level of care. The tota…
Reported Physical and Sexual Abuse in Childhood and Adult HIV Risk Behaviour in Three African Countries
Including ‘advisory networks’ in a participatory study on homelessness in Durban, South Africa
The value of social science research lies within the development and implementation of study designs that adequately address complex research questions. This not only relates to the sampling strategies employed, but also the quality and applicability of the research team and associated networks. In this paper, we demonstrate the importance of involving a diverse study team in our community-based participatory action research study on homelessness…
Prevalence and number of children living in institutional care
Modelling the impact of maternal HIV on uninfected children
A mathematical model, populated primarily with data from South Africa, was developed to model the numbers of children affected by maternal HIV, and the number who will experience long-term negative developmental consequences. A micro-simulation model generated two scenarios. The first simulated a cohort of women whose HIV status mimicked that of a target population, and mother-child dyads by way of age- and disease-specific fertility rates. Facto…
Catch-up growth in height and cognitive function
Cognitive and Language Development at Age 4–6 Years in Children HIV‐Exposed But Uninfected Compared to Those HIV‐Unexposed and to Children Living With HIV
Perinatal HIV infection is associated with delayed neurocognitive development, but less is known about children perinatally HIV-exposed but uninfected (CHEU). We compared cognitive and language outcomes in 4-6-year old CHEU versus children HIV-unexposed and uninfected (CHUU) and children living with HIV (CLHIV). We enrolled 1,581 children (77% of the child population) in five communities in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Children completed: Grover-…
Covid-19
Covid-19 infections and related illness and death are rightly at the forefront of our minds. It is critical that we consider how to reduce infections, treat those who are ill and protect health systems. We must, however, also consider how the pandemic is affecting the families of those infected, and how interventions to prevent the spread of the virus come with large negative economic and social consequences. We must begin to identify the ways in…
Realising the potential human development returns to investing in early and maternal nutrition
The benefits of interventions which improve early nutrition are well recognised. These benefits, however, only accrue to the extent that later life circumstances allow. Consequently, in adverse contexts many of the benefits will never be realised, particularly for the most vulnerable, exacerbating inequality. Returns to investment in early nutrition could be improved if we identified contextual factors constraining their realisation and intervent…
Storying ourselves
Mindful of 2020’s global focus on questions of systemic racism, this article looks at the continuing salience of the South African activist Steve Biko’s ideas about Black Consciousness and consciousness-raising as they impact young people’s empowerment in African countries. In the context of the UK Research and Innovation Global Challenges Research Fund (UKRI GCRF) Accelerate Hub (2019–24), a project exploring interventions in adolescents’ lives …
First 1,000 days
BACKGROUND: Child cognitive development is often compromised in contexts of poverty and adversity, and these deficits tend to endure and affect the child across the life course. In the conditions of poverty and violence that characterise many low- and middle-income countries (LMIC), the capacity of parents to provide the kind of care that promotes good child development may be severely compromised, especially where caregivers suffer from depressi…
Association between caregiver and household alcohol use and child behavior problems in KwaZulu Natal, South Africa
Medicine (28 obras) · Poverty, Education, and Child Welfare (23 obras) · Economics (22 obras) · Economic growth (19 obras) · Psychology (19 obras) · Sociology (17 obras) · Environmental health (16 obras) · Demography (14 obras) · Political science (14 obras) · Geography (13 obras)