Evaluation of a population mobility,mortality, and birth surveillance system in South Kivu,Democratic Republic of the Congo

Prospective, community-based surveillance systems for measuring birth, death, and population movement rates may have advantages over the ‘gold-standard’ retrospective household survey in humanitarian contexts. A community-based, monthly surveillance system was established in South Kivu, Democratic Republic of the Congo, in partnership with a local implementing partner and the national ministry of health. Data were collected on the occurrence of births, deaths, arrivals, and departures over the course of one year, and a retrospective survey was conducted at the end of the period to validate the information. Discrepancies between the two approaches were resolved by a third visit to the households with discordant records. The study found that the surveillance system was superior in terms of its specificity and sensitivity in measuring crude mortality and birth rates as compared to the survey, demonstrating the method's potential to measure accurately important population-level health metrics in an insecure setting in a timely, community-acceptable manner.     

Monitoring and reporting attacks on education in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Somalia

The United Nations' Monitoring and Reporting Mechanism is charged with documenting six grave violations against children in a time of conflict, including attacks on schools. Many of these incidents, however, remain unreported across the globe. This study explores whether or not a local knowledge base of education and child protection actors in North and South Kivu Provinces, Democratic Republic of the Congo, and in Mogadishu, Somalia, could contribute to a more complete record of attacks on education in those areas. Hundreds of semi‐structured interviews were conducted with key informants across the three settings, and in total 432 attacks on education were documented. Purposive samples of these reports were verified and a large majority was confirmed. Local non‐governmental organisations and education institutions were most knowledgeable about these incidents, but most never reported them to a monitoring authority. The study concludes that attack surveillance and response were largely insufficient, and recommends investing in mechanisms that utilise local knowledge to address these shortcomings.     

Littoral Fish Communities in Lake Tanganyika: Irreplaceable Diversity Supported by Intricate Interactions among Species

The rocky littoral areas of Lake Tanganyika harbor diverse fish communities, mainly composed of cichlids. Their stability, structure, and organizing mechanism were examined at three locations by census, behavioral observations, and dietary analyses. These fish communities were stable, characterized by their persistence during a 10-year period and resilience after a perturbation. Partitioning of spawning sites among substrate spawners was evident, which might be a factor in their ability to coexist. The fish communities were consistently composed of 12 food-habit groups, but composition of species in each group differed from location to location. Among species of different food-habit groups, facultative commensalisms were prevalent. Although aggressive interactions are common among fishes of the same food-habit group, each predatory fish obtained an advantage in feeding efficiency from the different feeding behaviors of other species of the same group. This mutualism and the facultative commensalism should both increase species richness in different parts of the communities. These intricate interactions among species may be a base of stability of the fish communities. We assert that maintenance of ecological networks among species are most important for conservation of biodiversity in tropical regions.