Explore the vast range of titles available.

Dietary diversity is an indicator of nutrition that has been found positively associated with diet quality, micronutrient adequacy, and improved maternal health and child growth. Due to the cultural responsibility of women in providing food at the household level, their status is very important to perform this role. Hence, this study has been conducted on the status of dietary diversity of the mother and child to understand how it relates to various factors of women in urban settings. Data were obtained from 1978 mother–child pairs living in different cities in Bangladesh. The foods taken by the women and children were categorized into 10 and 7 groups to measure women's dietary diversity (WDD) and children's dietary diversity (CDD), respectively. The study found that more than three‐fourths of the mothers and half of the children had low dietary diversity. The household wealth holdings and access to resources by the women were found inadequate, while two‐thirds of them had the lowest to medium level of nutritional knowledge. The binomial logistic regression model was used to measure the factors influencing WDD and CDD. The findings also indicated that children's dietary diversity was influenced by the mother's age, education, supportive attitude and behavior of husband, and access to and control over resources. While the household wealth index can enhance both child and mother's dietary variety, nutrition knowledge, dietary counseling, and access to and control over resources can improve maternal dietary diversity. This study recommends improving women's socioeconomic status by increasing their wealth and access to resources and enhancing their nutrition knowledge by providing food and nutrition counseling. More than three‐fourths of the mothers and half of the children in urban Bangladesh had low dietary diversity. Mother's age, years of schooling, supportive attitude and behavior of husband, access to and control over resources, and household wealth affected children's dietary diversity. Nutritional knowledge, dietary counseling, access to and control over resources, and household wealth influenced women's dietary diversity.

This report provides tremendous insight on gender norms an area that has been resistant to change, and that constrains achievement of gender equality across many diverse cultures. The report synthesizes data collected from more than 4,000 women and men in 97 communities across 20 countries. It is the largest dataset ever collected on the topic of gender and development, providing an unprecedented opportunity to examine potential patterns across communities on social norms and gender roles, pathways of empowerment, and factors that drive acute inequalities. The analysis raises the profile of persistent social norms and their impact on agency, and catalyzes discourse on the many pathways that create opportunities for women and men to negotiate transformative change. The report is underpinned by the fact that arguably the single most important contribution to development is to unleash the full power of half the people on the planet women. It underscores how crucial making investments in learning, supporting innovations that reduce the time costs of women s mobility, and developing a critical mass of women and men pushing the boundaries of entrenched social norms are in enhancing women s agency and capacity to aspire.

The purpose of the present study was to assess the association between microfinance and contraceptive use. A secondary purpose of the study was to assess the role of control over resources between microfinance participation and contraceptive use. Using secondary data from Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey 2011 the present study conducted logistic regression analysis to estimate the interaction effect of microfinance participation and control over resources on reported contraceptive use. Findings indicate that microfinance participants are 1.69 times more likely to use contraceptive (P < 0.001), and women with control over resources are 4.28 times more likely to use contraceptive (P < 0.001). However, the interaction effect of microfinance participation and control over resources suggest that microfinance participants with control over resources are less likely to use contraceptive, but that finding is not significant. While control over resources matter the most in terms of women's use of contraceptive, this does not hold true for microfinance participants with control over resources.

Long-endurance unmanned aerial vehicles (LE-UAVs) are extensively used due to their vast coverage and significant payload capacities. However, their limited autonomous intelligence necessitates the intervention of ground control resources (GCRs), which include one or more operators, during mission execution. The performance of these missions is notably affected by the varying effectiveness of different GCRs and their fatigue levels. Current research on multi-UAV mission planning inadequately addresses these critical factors. To tackle this practical issue, we present an integrated optimization problem for multi-LE-UAV mission planning combined with heterogeneous GCR allocation. This problem extends traditional multi-UAV cooperative mission planning by incorporating GCR allocation decisions. The coupling of mission planning decisions with GCR allocation decisions increases the dimensionality of the decision space, rendering the problem more complex. By analyzing the problem’s characteristics, we develop a mixed-integer linear programming model. To effectively solve this problem, we propose a bilevel programming algorithm based on a hybrid genetic algorithm framework. Numerical experiments demonstrate that our proposed algorithm effectively solves the problem, outperforming the advanced optimization toolkit CPLEX. Remarkably, for larger-scale instances, our algorithm achieves superior solutions within 10 s compared with CPLEX’s 2 h runtime.

A critical analysis of the World Bank's strategy to combat HIV/AIDS in Africa. The World Bank's Commitment to HIV/AIDS in Africa examines the development challenges posed by HIV/AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa and outlines a comprehensive agenda for action. This report reaffirms the World Bank's dedication to supporting African countries in achieving their Universal Access targets, integrating AIDS into national development plans, and strengthening national systems. This agenda provides a roadmap for policymakers, development practitioners, and researchers seeking to understand and address the complexities of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Africa. Discover how the World Bank is working with partners to: * Provide sustainable funding for HIV/AIDS programs * Promote evidence-based strategies for prevention and treatment * Strengthen governance and accountability * Build capacity in key sectors This report is essential reading for anyone committed to global health and development in Africa.

Trade liberalization can create economic opportunities for poor people. But are these opportunities available to men and women equally? Do the gender disparities in access to education, health, credit, and other resources limit the gains from trade and the potential benefits to poor women? This volume introduces the gender dimension into empirical analyses of the links between trade and poverty, which can improve policy making. The collection of chapters in this book is close to an ideal macro-micro evaluation technique that explicitly assesses the importance of gender in determining the poverty effects of trade shocks. Part I, relying on ex ante simulation approaches, focuses on the macroeconomic links between trade and gender, where labor market structure and its functioning play a key role. Part II concentrates on micro models of households and attempts to identify the ex post effects of trade shocks on household income levels and consumption choices. It also addresses questions about possible changes in inequality within households due to improved economic opportunities for women. 'Gender Aspects of the Trade and Poverty Nexus' will be invaluable to policy makers, development practitioners and researchers, journalists, and students.

Dominance in the peer group is important for adolescents. Resource Control Theory posits that both coercive and prosocial (positively assertive) strategies are associated with dominance. Combining Resource Control Theory with Socioanalytic Theory on personality, we hypothesized that inspiring group members would be an additional effective strategy. This study examined whether the three behavioral strategies and two types of social skills (social competence and manipulation) predicted dominance (resource control and popularity). Participants were 619 Dutch adolescents (Mage = 13.1; 47% female) in the first grade of secondary school. They completed peer reports (behavioral strategies and dominance) and self-reports (social skills). Only inspirational and coercive strategies substantially predicted dominance. Main effects of social skills emerged. Moderation between strategies and social skills was only observed for girls (e.g., coercive strategy use was associated with more popularity for girls with higher levels of social manipulation skills). This study furthered our understanding of the predictors of dominance in adolescence by including inspirational behavior and examining prosocial and antisocial skills.

Since the issue of human trafficking is subject to judicial, moral and political constraints, this research chose to study Vietnamese sex workers in Phnom Penh as a common migration phenomenon in order to see when, how and why some women ended up in situations of bondage. On the basis of four months of research in the Mekong delta, the paper explores the journeys leading Vietnamese women to Phnom Penh. It concurs with the recent literature that debtbonded sex work is not always an unending situation and that it could be an effective means to cope with socio-cultural pressures. We argue that, in addition to labour arrangements, some women find in sex work a way to deal with their (in)dependency with regards to their families, achieving greater control over their resources and experimenting different meanings of womanhood. Far from denying human trafficking, the paper tries to explore the grey area that lies between this extreme and voluntary migration. While the results of this research are not representative of the whole phenomenon, we argue that these few elements help explain why women keep taking the risks of migration for sex work and expose themselves to situations of bonded labour.

In this paper, we present the development of a decentralized mechanism for the resources control in a distributed computer system based on a network-centric approach. Intially, the network-centric approach was proposed for the military purposes, and now its principles are successfully introduced in the other applications of the complex systems control. Due to the features of control systems based on the network-centric approach, namely adding the horizontal links between components of the same level, adding the general knowledge control in the system, etc., there are new properties and characteristics. The concept of implementing of resource control module for a distributed computer system based on a network-centric approach is proposed in this study. We, basing on this concept, realized the resource control module and perform the analysis of its operation parameters in compare with resource control modules implemented on the hierarchical approach and on the decentralized approach with the creation of the communities of the computing resources. The experiments showed the advantages of the proposed mechanism for resources control in compare with the control mechanisms based on the hierarchical and decentralized approaches.

With a growing world population and changing patterns of global precipitation, researchers are examining a number of options in the management and supply of fresh water to areas where the demand for fresh water is outstripping local availability. These options include bulk water exports as well as the establishment of desalination plants. This paper argues that three key factors will determine the possibility of such trade. These factors are: (a) the travelling distance of the marine vessels from the fresh water source to the population, (b) the cost of capital and (c) the average expected utilization rate of local desalination plant. It concludes that the supply of bulk water transported by single hulled marine vessels is economically viable if the distance is less than 548 miles (884 km). For greater distances, the cost of drinking water production using desalination technology is cost effective. In any case the supply of these single hulled marine vessels is limited, as new ones are unlikely to be built for water only. Thus local communities are unlikely to lose control over water resources owing to export trade.