Evaluating the impact of an intervention to increase uptake of modern contraceptives among adolescent girls (15-19 years) in Nigeria, Ethiopia and Tanzania: the Adolescents 360 quasi-experimental study protocol.

INTRODUCTION: Nigeria, Ethiopia and Tanzania have some of the highest teenage pregnancy rates and lowest rates of modern contraceptive use among adolescents. The transdisciplinary Adolescents 360 (A360) initiative being rolled out across these three countries uses human-centred design to create context-specific multicomponent interventions with the aim of increasing voluntary modern contraceptive use among girls aged 15-19 years. METHODS: The primary objective of the outcome evaluation is to assess the impact of A360 on the modern contraceptive prevalence rate (mCPR) among sexually active girls aged 15-19 years. A360 targets different subpopulations of adolescent girls in the three countries. In Northern Nigeria and Ethiopia, the study population is married girls aged 15-19 years. In Southern Nigeria, the study population is unmarried girls aged 15-19 years. In Tanzania, both married and unmarried girls aged 15-19 years will be included in the study. In all settings, we will use a prepopulation and postpopulation-based cross-sectional survey design. In Nigeria, the study design will also include a comparison group. A one-stage sampling design will be used in Nigeria and Ethiopia. A two-stage sampling design will be used in Tanzania. Questionnaires will be administered face-to-face by female interviewers aged between 18 and 26 years. Study outcomes will be assessed before the start of A360 implementation in late 2017 and approximately 24 months after implementation in late 2019. ETHICS AND DISSEMINATION: Findings of this study will be widely disseminated through workshops, conference presentations, reports, briefings, factsheets and academic publications

Resource Cube:Multi-Virtual Resource Management for Integrated Satellite-Terrestrial Industrial IoT Networks

Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has found wider research, and satellite-terrestrial network (STN) can provide large-scale seamless connections for IIoT. With virtualization, we design resource cube to describe the integration and state of multi-dimensional virtual resources. To achieve higher resource utilization and smarter connections, we design a matching considered preferences (MCPR) algorithm to match IIoT nodes with service sides. The matching design considers the resource cube (MCRC) algorithm based on MCPR algorithm to lower the total system delay. In addition, in order to simplify the analysis of resource management, we adopt a layered architecture and multiple M/M/1 queuing models. We analyze the resource utilization and the total system delay for three different combinations of arrival rate and service rate of each resource cube. With MCRC algorithm, the utilization of resources is slightly reduced, while the total system delay is greatly reduced compared with MCPR algorithm. © 1967-2012 IEEE

FP2020: Partnership in Progress 2013-2014

All women and girls have the right, and must have the means, to decide freely and for themselves whether and when to have children. Access to voluntary family planning leads to transformational benefits across the development spectrum, and is one of the smartest investments a country can make in its future. At the 2012 London Summit on Family Planning, leaders from around the world committed to expanding contraceptive access to an additional 120 million women and girls in the world's 69 poorest countries by the year 2020. Family Planning 2020 (FP2020) is the movement that carries this global effort forward. This report examines the progress being made in the FP2020 effort

Guide for assessing the impact of a Total Market Approach to family planning programs

PATH has drawn on its global experience from our total market approach (TMA) work in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Myanmar, Nicaragua, Uganda, and Vietnam to produce a TMA planning guide to increase access to family planning. The guide (Planning Guide for a Total Market Approach to Increase Access to Family Planning—Module 1: Landscape Assessment) and toolkit, produced by The Evidence Project, contain practical information and specific tools to help organizations and other planners conduct a landscape assessment, the first phase in developing a TMA. These resources are part of a larger toolkit, which also includes an in-depth market analysis and two-volume handbook produced by MEASURE Evaluation, and this joint publication by all three projects

On the structure of natural human movement

Understanding of human motor control is central to neuroscience with strong implications in the fields of medicine, robotics and evolution. It is thus surprising that the vast majority of motor control studies have focussed on human movement in the laboratory while neglecting behaviour in natural environments. We developed an experimental paradigm to quantify human behaviour in high resolution over extended periods of time in ecologically relevant environments. This allows us to discover novel insights and contradictory evidence to well-established findings obtained in controlled laboratory conditions. Using our data, we map the statistics of natural human movement and their variability between people. The variability and complexity of the data recorded in these settings required us to develop new tools to extract meaningful information in an objective, data-driven fashion. Moving from descriptive statistics to structure, we identify stable structures of movement coordination, particularly within the arm-hand area. Combining our data with numerous published findings, we argue that current hypotheses that the brain simplifies motor control problems by dimensionality reduction are too reductionist. We propose an alternative hypothesis derived from sparse coding theory, a concept which has been successfully applied to the sensory system. To investigate this idea, we develop an algorithm for unsupervised identification of sparse structures in natural movement data. Our method outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms for accuracy and data-efficiency. Applying this method to hand data reveals a dictionary of \emph{sparse eigenmotions} (SEMs) which are well preserved across multiple subjects. These are highly efficient and invariant representation of natural movement, and suggest a potential higher-order grammatical structure or ``movement language''. Our findings make a number of testable predictions about neural coding of movement in the cortex. This has direct consequences for advancing research on dextrous prosthetics and robotics, and has profound implications for our understanding of how the brain controls our body.Open Acces

White Privilege Attitudes Scale—General Version: A Validation Study

The White Privilege Attitudes Scale assesses the level of awareness and attitudes of White privilege in counseling students. The current study provided further validation for this scale in use with the general public by collecting data from 305 adults. The subsequently revised WPAS-GV contains 43 items on a 5-point Likert scale, derived from three hierarchical themes and corresponding to three subscales: Sustaining Disparity, Seeking Clarity and Acknowledging Responsibility. This validation study provides supportive findings on the subscales\u27 consistency and validity, conducted with the MRS, WRIAS, MCPR, and the MCSDS. This article also introduces new items for the subscale Seeking Clarity and discusses the inclusion of biracial individuals in research about White privilege

Strengthening social and behavior change monitoring and evaluation for family planning in Francophone West Africa

This report summarizes findings from a mapping of family planning investments, technical approaches and indicators, identifies indicator gaps, and makes recommendations to governments, donors, researchers and implementers to improve social and behavior change activity measurement in Francophone West Africa

Breaking the bttleneck: Understanding the intractable bottlenecks and data-informed decision-making to deliver life-saving commodities for women and children

Philosophiae Doctor - PhDAccess to life-saving commodities and related services for women and children is a fundamental component of universal health coverage. However, countries confront numerous intractable challenges, such as aligning regulatory practices, enhancing health workforce capacity, and effectively managing supply chains, to ensure essential reproductive, maternal, newborn and child health (RMNCH) commodities and services reach all communities. To address these entrenched obstacles, the UN Commission on Life Saving Commodities for Women and Children (UNCoLSC) in 2012 outlined a series of recommendations to improve access to 13 low-cost and high-impact commodities. This thesis explores the improvements and remaining barriers to accessing life-saving commodities for women and children in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia. In addition, this thesis showcases how effective data-informed decision-making can support prioritized RMNCH investments and equitycentered action

Inclusion and bias in public health training

Introduction: Recent recommendations to revise health professional education have called for including how structural racism contributes to health inequities. Little is known, however, about which components of public health training either perpetuate or challenge structural racism. I conducted a mixed methods study to assess how structural racism was manifested and addressed during one school of public health’s (SPH) revision of its Master of Public Health (MPH) core curriculum. Methods: Grounded in Critical Race Theory, this dissertation examined MPH students’ views of social dominance orientation, motivations to suppress prejudice, and paternalism in a workplace context (Aim 1) as well as the process of developing a new core MPH curriculum (Aim 2). As the three scales administered had not previously been tested among health professional trainees, confirmatory factor analyses were conducted to assess their appropriateness for use in this population. Additionally, I tested a hypothesized structural equation model (SEM) that posited these three scales would be related to underlying investment in one’s own group and investment in other groups. The committee-driven MPH core syllabi development process was explored using participant-observations and in-depth interviews as part of an institutional ethnography (IE). Results: The factor structure of all three scales was confirmed, indicating these scales are appropriate for use among health trainees. Students showed low social dominance (mean=1.55, SD=0.80) and nonegalitarianism (mean=1.86, SD=0.98), moderate external motivation to suppress prejudice (mean=3.67, SD=1.53), high internal motivation (mean=6.43, SD=0.58), and moderate paternalism (mean=3.66, SD=1.02). The SEM did not perform as hypothesized. IE findings revealed decision-making potential of committee members of color was limited by structural and social processes throughout the development process. Equity-related content was vulnerable to being reduced, when compared to more traditional content. Conclusion: MPH students bring a complex view of the relationship between public health professionals and communities of color; warranting explicit instruction on structural racism’s contributions to health inequities. Existing social and structural methods of developing curricula undermine goals to provide more inclusive training to students. While further research is needed into factors studied, findings suggest the development of dramatically more inclusive curricula requires extensive anti-racism training at multiple levels within a SPH.Doctor of Philosoph

Canadians’ Attitudes Toward Immigrants Who Claim Employment Discrimination

This dissertation examined how prejudice may operate in the treatment of immigrants when they claim workplace discrimination. In line with the Justification-Suppression Model of the Expression of Prejudice (JSM; Crandall & Eshleman, 2003), I expected more negative attitudes toward an immigrant claimant from a dissimilar culture (Iran) compared to an immigrant claimant from a similar culture (Britain) and a second generation Iranian Canadian. All three studies utilized experimental design. The results of Study 1 demonstrated that the Iranian claimant was especially likely to be seen as not having experienced discrimination, more deserving of and responsible for the dismissal, and was especially likely to be derogated, compared to an Iranian Canadian claimant. Attributions of personal responsibility mediated the effect of country of origin on target derogation and outcome deservingness. In Study 2, the claimant from Iran elicited more negative attitudes than a claimant from Britain. Moreover, participants who suppressed their prejudice less reported more bias against the claimant from Iran as compared to the Iranian Canadian claimant. In addition to the country of origin, Study 3 manipulated a source of attributions for discrimination. To do so, in addition to situational ambiguity, Study 3 added two other explanations for the discrimination claimant’s contract termination – one considered to be internal to the claimant and the other external. The results demonstrated suppression of prejudice against the claimant from Iran in all conditions. When the claimant was clearly unskilled for the job, there was an evidence of a “black sheep effect”- more negative attitudes toward the British claimant. Finally, in the situation with an authority figure responsible for discrimination, the second generation Iranian Canadian elicited more negativity. These effects may be explained by attributions of personal responsibility and judgements of outcome deservingness. Taken together, these studies demonstrate that prejudice toward skilled immigrants from dissimilar cultures may contribute not only to employment discrimination, but also interfere with their attempts to seek justice when they proceed with a claim of discrimination