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Die Serviceabteilung Personal und Organisation bietet interne Dienstleistungen für den Vorstand des DIW Berlin und für die Abteilungsleitungen, MitarbeiterInnen und DoktorandInnen sowie für Gäste aus dem In- und Ausland.

Wir kümmern uns um alle administrativen Personalangelegenheiten und betreuen derzeit ca. 350 MitarbeiterInnen.

Darüber hinaus unterstützen wir den Vorstand und die Abteilungen bei der strategischen Organisations- und Personalentwicklung.

Zur Verstärkung unseres Teams suchen wir im Umfang von 65% zum 01.04.2022 eine/einen

ProjektmanagerIn Diversität und Chancengleichheit (w/m/div)

Depuis six mois, l'Eswatini — le nouveau nom du Swaziland, depuis 2018 —, est le théâtre d'une vague inédite de contestation et de manifestations. « Le royaume d'Eswatini est connu comme un pays pacifique, avec une culture de courtoisie, d'humanité et d'hospitalité », déclaraient le 19 octobre dernier les évêques de la Conférence épiscopale catholique d'Afrique du Sud (SACBC) qui venaient d'effectuer une visite pastorale dans cette petite nation d'Afrique australe, entourée par l'Afrique du Sud et limitrophe du (...)

Depuis l’apparition pour la première fois du nouveau variant du coronavirus (Omicron) en Afrique du Sud, les interrogations quant à l’efficacité des vaccins disponibles se multiplient. L’OMS s’est en fin exprimée à ce sujet, mais aussi sur la sévérité du nouveau variant.

Dans un entretien accordé à l’AFP dans la soirée d’hier mardi, le responsable des urgences de l’Organisation mondiale de la santé, Michael Ryan, affirme en effet « qu’il n’y a aucune raison de douter » de l’efficacité des vaccins contre le variant Omicron.

Ainsi, ce même responsable tient à écarter toutes les raisons de douter du fait que les vaccins actuels protègent les malades contaminés par le variant Omicron contre les formes sévères du Covid-19.

« Nous avons des vaccins très efficaces qui ont démontré leur pouvoir contre tous les variants jusqu’à présent, en termes de sévérité de la maladie et d’hospitalisation, et il n’y a aucune raison de penser que cela ne serait pas le cas avec Omicron », a expliqué l’intervenant.

Concernant le nouveau variant Omicron, le responsable des urgences de l’OMS se montre également rassurant. Selon lui, « le comportement général que nous observons jusqu’à présent ne montre aucune augmentation de la sévérité ».

À ce propos, il cite l’exemple de « certains endroits en Afrique australe font état de symptômes plus légers ». À titre de comparaison, il s’est dit « quasiment certain » que le variant Omicron ne cause pas de cas plus graves de Covid-19 que Delta.

Cependant, le même intervenant précise qu’il faudrait attendre encore « deux semaines au moins » pour savoir s’il se révèle même moins dangereux. Or, il préconise la prudence en affirmant : « Nous devons être très prudents dans notre façon d’analyser ».

L’article Variant Omicron et efficacité des vaccins : l’OMS rassure est apparu en premier sur .

Representatives from the APDA Global Young Leaders' Course during their presentations to the Asian and Arab parliamentarians, with Dr Hanna Yoon, who led the first youth course. Credit: APDA

By Erin Lee, Jayun Choi, Seungeun Lee and Chaeeun Shin
Seoul, South Korea, Dec 8 2021 (IPS)

Whether you look at society, the environment, or technology – the world is changing rapidly. Global organizations strive to adapt to this change. The United Nations, for example, has developed the Sustainable Development Goals as a blueprint for human development.

Youth must and should be at the forefront when tackling the changing world. Consequently, a socially literate, educated generation equipped to tackle these challenges is crucial, and many institutions are taking up this challenge.

The APDA Global Young Leaders’ Course is one such initiative. It has just completed its first year, supported by UNFPA, IPPF, and AFPPD.

The program’s founder Dr Hanna Yoon says future societal issues will be complex and multifaceted.

She wanted “to create a program where young leaders could learn to explore the relationships between two seemingly unrelated ideas.”

APDA Global Young Leaders’ Course participants learned new skills during the inaugural course. The participants, who are all at school, were required to create projects which would benefit people and the planet. Credit: APDA

Yoon devised the Leaders’ Course to help students develop skills to assist them in dealing with diversity. The course curriculum brought them in contact with unique ideas and perspectives, leadership through teamwork, and the ability to solve problems.

The program effectively combines a holistic curriculum and active learning techniques. APDA’s holistic curriculum, which featured ten different experts, seeks to prepare students for the multicultural societies of the future.

Dr Helen Lee taught students about the design thinking process, which they would later utilize in their projects.

Dr Osamu Kusumoto, APDA’s secretary-general, spoke about population issues.

Students learned how to initiate and manage innovative startups from Semoon Yoon from the World Economic Forum (WEF).

The vice executive director of Okayama University, Professor Mitsunobu Kano, introduced solutions that use medical care for social issues.

Farhana Haque Rahman, senior vice president of IPS, encouraged the students to write journals and spoke about the role of media in contemporary society.

Dr David Smith (need the first name, please), associate professor, Anglia Ruskin University, lectured on the correlation between ethnicity and inequality in global health.

Siobhán Tracey from Concern Worldwide Korea informed the students about the cause and impact of hunger.

UNFPA regional advisor Dr RintaroMori gave a lecture on aging and low birth rate.

Kevin Sanjoto, the group CEO at Alfabeta, taught about the fourth industrial revolution with its components of artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, and more, which can solve social problems.
Finally, Mr Saroj Dash, the director of the international programs of Concern Worldwide Korea, taught about climate-smart agriculture.

The course also featured various active learning opportunities, which prompted students to develop their knowledge and skills. They participated in discussions, carried out group activities, and gave presentations based on what they — and their teammates — had learned.

These problem-solving activities encouraged students to explore the material on their own. They based their learning on the design thinking process, which allowed students to consider a fundamental problem and independently create a solution.

It also ensured that students had room to develop their perspectives about what they had learned. These varying viewpoints could then be shared and improved as the students worked together.

APDA’s active, interdisciplinary approach sets it apart from the other programs.

It pushes students to challenge their pre-existing beliefs and understand the nuances behind various social issues. It also provides students with the right tools to harness the information they learned.

This process has helped us uncover our potential as the leaders of the 21st century.

At the end of the course, the future leaders presented at a youth forum. The teams then spoke to parliamentarians about the proposals they had been developing throughout the course. The students joined teams based on their interests in the global issues identified.

These issues included technological inequality among different social classes, another was negligent/careless littering, and a third was an uninformed citizenry.

The first team spoke about utilizing technology to empower social minorities and resolve poverty.

Their presentation included proposals like involving the youth in smart agriculture.
The second team discussed ways to reduce littering while increasing recycling. They introduced an application that utilizes collective intelligence to map out trash cans in public spaces.

The third and final team spoke about the need for an information-sharing system between government departments and firms. They used the Australian precedent to support their views on sharing health information.

Moreover, they devised a plan to call on the youth to combat the older persons’ issues with internet technology.

After the presentation, teams answered questions and debated their ideas with Arab and Asian parliamentarians.

The open discussion ranged from general feedback and questions of how to encourage the youth to participate in parliaments to specific inquiries regarding several policies proposed by the teams. Delegates also asked the students to collaborate with the youth in their countries.

Students eagerly responded to their offers, hoping to maintain a close and steady relationship in the future.

• This opinion editorial was written by the APDA Global Young Leaders’ Course students. The writers are all school-going pupils selected by their schools. This is the first in a series of opinion editorials written by participants on the 2021 course.
• Editing: Dr Hanna Yoon

• Nothing About Us, Without Us, Asian Youth Tell Parliamentarians
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• Young Migrant Workers Bear Brunt of COVID-19 Pandemic

Credit: European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD)

By Cevat Aksoy, Maxim Chupilkin, Zsoka Koczan and Alexander Plekhanov
LONDON, Dec 8 2021 (IPS)

Officially reported deaths from Covid-19 started to rise again in autumn 2021 in a number of economies in the EBRD regions. While in advanced economies in Europe the mortality rate has remained low despite the pick-up in Covid-19 cases, in the EBRD regions the mortality and infection rates continued to move in tandem.

Reflecting this, daily Covid-19 deaths per million population were four times higher in the EBRD regions than in advanced Europe as of November 2021.

These patterns may in part reflect differences in vaccination rates. In the EBRD regions, 36 per cent of the population (of all ages) were fully vaccinated by November 15 compared with 72 per cent in advanced economies in Europe.

Aggregate numbers mask significant differences within the EBRD regions, with these shares ranging from 9 per cent in Armenia to 65 per cent in Lithuania.

The regression analysis conducted by Cevat Aksoy, Maxim Chupilkin and Zsoka Koczan in the EBRD’s Office of the Chief Economist links differences in vaccination rates across more than 100 economies (including 28 economies in the EBRD regions) to average beliefs about safety of vaccines.

Attitudes towards vaccines are inferred from Wellcome Global Monitor, a representative survey conducted in 2018.

The analysis also takes into account Covid-19 deaths, income per capita, demographic factors, quality of economic institutions, early availability of vaccines, people’s mobility (movements to transit stations, places of work, retail and recreation and grocery stores compiled by Google Analytics) and other relevant factors.

Since the economic and epidemiological situation may itself be affected by the vaccine rollout, mobility indices and Covid-19 deaths relate to 2020, the period prior to the vaccination campaign.

As could be expected, Covid-19 vaccination rates are typically higher in economies where a larger share of the population believe vaccines to be safe and effective. In the EBRD regions, the prevalence of such beliefs was relatively low before the Covid-19 crisis.

On the supply side, the share of the population that was fully vaccinated in October 2021 is higher in economies with higher number of doctors per capita and where vaccinations started earlier, according to the regression analysis.

On the demand side, a ten percentage point improvement in attitudes toward vaccines increases the vaccination rate by about 2 percentage points. Lower economic mobility in the past is associated with higher vaccination rates – reflecting greater impact of the Covid-19 on livelihoods as well as lower tolerance of health risks reflected in lower mobility of people during the pandemic.

Both on the demand and on the supply side, economies with higher income per capita and better economic institutions tend to have higher vaccination rates, owing to better administrative capacity to roll out vaccination campaigns and higher levels of trust (which tend to be highly correlated with income and institutions).

The measure of economic institutions averages Worldwide Governance Indicators of control of corruption, rule of law, government effectiveness and regulatory quality.

These factors together account for almost 80 per cent of the variation in vaccination rates observed across more than 100 economies. Once various country characteristics are taken into account, vaccination rates in the EBRD regions are somewhat lower than in other economies but the difference (of around 4 percentage points) is not statistically significant.

Favourable attitudes to vaccines, in turn, are higher among individuals who trust their governments. This conclusion emerges from the 2018 Wellcome Global Monitor, a representative survey of over 100,000 individuals in 138 economies.

Indeed, a recent EBRD working paper shows that governments face the challenge of convincing the public that vaccines can be trusted and effectiveness of such communication, in turn, depends on trust in governments themselves.

Respondents were asked whether they viewed vaccines as safe and, separately, effective. The analysis links responses to these questions to individuals’ stated trust in government while taking into account various individual characteristics: residing in an urban area, having a child under 15, gender, employment status, religion, level of education, income quintile, age cohort and the country of residence.

Individuals who trust in their government are around 8 percentage points more likely to have positive attitudes towards vaccination. Further analysis reveals that these relationships are similar among people of different gender, education and age.

The EBRD was created in April 1991 to ‘foster the transition towards open market-oriented economies and to promote private and entrepreneurial initiative’.

Alexander Plekhanov is Director, Transition Impact and Global Economics; Cevat Giray Aksoy is Principal Economist; Zsoka Koczan is Associate Director, Senior Economist; and Maxim Chupilkin is Macroeconomic Analyst.