What is the Project about?

This is a new project, unveiled in 2012 and coordinated by the COHRED (Council on Health Research for Development Group). MASCOT gathers partners and experts from Africa, Latin America and Europe, to identify and implement strategies for tackling health inequalities preferentially affecting children, adolescents and mothers.

Inequalities and vulnerable groups’ health, as well as the slow advances to achieve the health-related Millennium Development Goals, are concerns that need to be addressed, notably for low and middle-income countries. While some countries have made advances, these remain unknown to others that could still benefit from their experience. Higher collaboration could help, but is quite difficult to achieve. The MASCOT project aims to address this problem.

What is set to happen in the Project?

The main objective of MASCOT is to stimulate the cooperation between countries from three world regions (Europe, Africa, and Latin America) in order to identify and implement adequate and efficient country-specific strategies for tackling health inequalities preferentially affecting children, adolescents and mothers. MASCOT aims achieve its impact by:

• Creating links between North-South and South-South efforts in addressing maternal and child health (MCH) and health inequalities in low- and middle income countries;
• Provide evidence on best practice and policy advice for the development of future public health and health systems interventions.

Project Achievements

MASCOT is expected to provide better coordinating mechanisms for South-South and North-South collaboration to:

• Enhance regional and local infrastructure, capabilities and capacities of research for health;
• Stimulate knowledge transfer and exchange mechanisms between and within countries for shaping policies, programs and health actions intended to provide better health and health services.

A full dissemination plan and products are ready for partners to use, these include a presentation template, brochure, flyer, poster, newsletter, webpage and intranet for Consortium Partners. Ultimately, MASCOT should allow reducing gaps in health inequalities between and within different world regions as the end-result of the strengthened collaborative actions. A number of countries to work with have been selected, as well as country experts to support data gathering. These Experts were trained in a Workshop that took place March 12-15 in Costa Rica. Mapping guidelines were issued, as well as specific tools for each component.

COHRED’s Partners

MASCOT is coordinated by the COHRED Group. MASCOT is supported by the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement n° 282507. MASCOT is running from October 1, 2011 to March 31, 2014. The MASCOT Consortium comprises

• COHRED (Council on Health Research for Development),
• Euroquality,
• Sociedade Portuguesa de Inovacao,
• Fundacion Instituto CentroAmericano de Salud Internacional,
• Instituto Nacional de Salud Publica,
• Universidad Catolica de la Santisima Concepcion,
• Centre for Health Policy – University of the Witwatersrand Johannesburg,
• National Institute for Medical Research (Tanzania),
• School of Public Health – University of Ghana,
• Health Action Partnership International,
• Hopital Farhat Hached de Sousse

For more information

Francisco Becerra on email: becerra@cohred.org

Read the brochure on MASCOT

News/Events: MASCOT experts meeting, 29-30 October 2012

See the MASCOT website: www.mascotfp7.eu