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This article views the many national and international programs concerned with child survival in developing countries as sharing one important objective, i.e. the exchange of specialized knowledge to mothers who are the primary caretakers of children under age five. If mothers do not possess the knowledge required to develop proper care‐seeking practices, then return on investments in infrastructure, drugs, and human resources development, as these relate to child‐killer diseases such as diarrhea and acute respiratory infection, may not be optimal. Cognizant of reports of the limited impact of health promotion programs, in spite of the investments made, the article models the knowledge exchange process to pinpoint possible sources of problems. Pertinent issues of quality assurance are raised and the consequences of neglecting them pointed out. Some empirical evidence is offered in support of these predicted consequences. Proposes a value analysis framework, to make the point that paying attention to quality assurance concerns is more about optimizing the fit between available resources and ideal outcomes, rather than always being about additional resources.

This chapter offers an analysis of the decision code of Khaled Mashal, the former leader of the Hamas organization. Using the Applied Decision Analysis (ADA) method, it examines five decisions made by Mashal in 2011–2017. The analysis suggests that Mashal tends to use mainly the poliheuristic decision rule in these decisions, and considers the political-organizational dimension of Hamas as non-compensatory. Thus, Mashal made these decisions by first eliminating any alternative which risked his organization’s political status, and only then he rationally chose the alternative with the greatest expected utility from the remaining ones.

There is almost a consensus amongst Muslim scholars that the most crucial problem faced by the Muslim world is in the prevailing ideas (including sanctification, archaism, the common paradigm, the absence of the role of the intellectual, etc.) which formulate people’s thoughts and determine their options. There will not be a genuine renaissance of Islam without updating these ideas and emerging from the cocoon of the past. This can be done through a modern approach which would respond to the changes by looking towards the future rather than towards the past. This study aims to identify the intellectual aspects of this crisis and how this crisis has formed and influenced Islamic banking.

To analyse this crisis, the methodology called causal layered analysis (CLA) is used, which is drawn from the field of strategic foresight and designed by Inayatullah (2002). CLA is designed on the basis that the way to understand the nature of the problem will determine the proposed solutions, by diving through the surface phenomena of the problem to the depth of the “motors” of the crisis.

The author finds that Islamic banking is the offspring of its incubator ideas and reform, and the change and progress of Islamic banking can only deal with a critical approach of these ideas; Islamic banking promotes itself as an alternative to conventional banking, but this has not been achieved except on the level of form rather than substance; Islamic banking is a movement within a variable reality, and inertia in specific form and context will keep it in a state of crisis and may lead to its demise.

To the author’s knowledge, this is the first study showing the roots of the ideas making up the fabric of banking in the Muslim world and the repercussions of intellectual crisis on Islamic banking.

Much work about health reform and systems improvement in healthcare looks at shortcomings and universal problems facing health systems, but rarely are accomplishments dissected and analyzed internationally. The purpose of this paper is to address this knowledge gap by examining the lessons learned from health system reform and improvement efforts in 60 countries.

In total, 60 low-, middle- and high-income countries provided a case study of successful health reform, which was gathered into a compendium as a recently published book. Here, the extensive source material was re-examined through inductive content analysis to derive broad themes of systems change internationally.

Nine themes were identified: improving policy, coverage and governance; enhancing the quality of care; keeping patients safe; regulating standards and accreditation; organizing care at the macro-level; organizing care at the meso- and micro-level; developing workforces and resources; harnessing technology and IT; and making collaboratives and partnerships work.

These themes provide a model of what constitutes successful systems change across a wide sample of health systems, offering a store of knowledge about how reformers and improvement initiators achieve their goals.

Few comparative international studies of health systems include a sufficiently wide selection of low-, middle- and high-income countries in their analysis. This paper provides a more balanced approach to consider where achievements are being made across healthcare, and what we can do to replicate and spread successful examples of systems change internationally.