The inequality of maternal health in urban sub-Saharan Africa

Numerous studies document the urban poor disadvantage in child health conditions in African cities. This study uses DHS data from 23 countries in sub-Saharan Africa to examine whether the urban poor experience comparable disadvantages in maternal health. The results show that although the urban poor on average receive better antenatal and delivery care than rural residents, they consistently have poorer maternal health indicators than the urban non-poor. Further analyses based on a multilevel approach reveal significant variations in urban maternal health inequalities across countries of sub-Saharan Africa. The urban poor disadvantage is more pronounced in countries with better average maternal health indicators, where the urban poor tend to be even worse off than rural residents

The impact of rural-urban migration on child survival

Large rural-urban child mortality differentials in many developing countries suggest that rural families can improve their children’s survival chances by leaving the countryside and settling in towns and cities. This study uses data from Demographic and Health Surveys in 17 countries to assess the impact of maternal rural-urban migration on the survival chances of children under age two in the late 1970s and 1980s. Results show that, before migration, children of migrant women had similar or slightly higher mortality risks than children of women who remained in the village. In the two-year period surrounding their mother’s migration, their chances of dying increased sharply as a result of accompanying their mothers or being left behind, to levels well above those of rural and urban non-migrant children. Children born after migrants had settled in the urban area, however, gradually experienced much better survival chances than children of rural non-migrants, as well as lower mortality risks than migrants’ children born in rural areas before migration. The study concludes that many disadvantaged urban children would probably have been much worse off had their mothers remained in the village, and that millions of children’s lives may have been saved in the 1980s as a result of mothers moving to urban areas

Cross Cultural Variables: Evaluating Employee Attitudes Across Four Regions Of Asia, Europe, North And Latin America

There has been an explosion of businesses moving operations overseas, setting up international joint ventures and establishing multinational enterprises. This trend has led organizational researchers as well as corporations to explore the implications of cultural differences in managing a workforce. Can the same Western management practices be used as effectively with employees in Asia as in North America? Does the application of Western management principles in multinationals affect aspects of job satisfaction in non-Western countries? This poster reports the findings from two exploratory analyses on the relationship between job attitudes and the geographic/cultural setting of business organizations. The first analysis is an overview of the levels and correlates of job satisfaction in four regions, North America, East Asia, Europe, and Latin America, and in nine countries of East Asia – China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, and Thailand. The second analysis uses 2002 survey data from three large multinational companies, in financial services, manufacturing, and oil & gas production, to examine the relative importance of top and immediate management, recognition, teamwork, salary and pay, and other employee attitudes for overall job satisfaction across these four regions. The research suggests that it is advisable for multinational companies to examine differences in employee views geographically to gain an understanding of attitudes and influences on occupational satisfaction in each of the countries they are involved in

Urban growth in developing countries: A review of projections and predictions

Comparison of the United Nations’ earliest and most recent projections to the year 2000 suggests that urban and city growth in developing regions has occurred much more slowly than was anticipated as recently as 1980. A modified “urban population explosion” in developing countries since the 1970s conforms to explanatory models of urban growth developed by economists around 1980. Trends in productivity and terms of trade, in particular, have been highly favorable to agriculture as compared to manufacturing, presumably slowing migration to urban centers. Increases in national population growth rates have produced less than commensurate in rates of city growth, further supporting an economic and migration-related explanation for unexpectedly slow recent urban growth. Despite the efforts of the United Nations to maintain reliable statistics on urban and city populations, urban population projections should be interpreted with caution because of the inadequacies of the data on which they are based. Moreover, current projections that virtually all world population growth in the future will occur in urban areas of developing countries may be misconstrued, if the forces that have retarded urban growth in recent years persist

Job Satisfaction Determinants: A Study Across 48 Nations

This paper examines the drivers of job satisfaction across four cultural regions—Asia, Europe, North America, and Latin America. Using Hofstede’s theory, determinants were used to predict job satisfaction for each region and then compared to determine significant differences. Data was collected from a proprietary industry survey on employee work attitudes. The sample consisted of over 70,000 employees from 4 large multinational organizations. Data was analyzed using regression analysis and comparison testing across models. There are significant relationships between job characteristics and job satisfaction across all regions of the world, with a sense of achievement universally the most important driver. Although job characteristics impact job satisfaction across all regions, there are significant differences in the relative importance of job characteristics on job satisfaction, consistent with Hofstede’s cultural dimensions. The findings have implications for tailoring human resource management practices across locations within multinationals.This research is believed to be the first cross-cultural study of the job determinants affecting job satisfaction using multiple organizations and industries

Migration, sexual behavior and HIV diffusion in Kenya

The association of migration with the spread of AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa is well documented, yet the social and behavioral mechanisms underlying this relationship remain poorly understood. Using data from the 1993 Kenya Demographic and Health Survey, this paper examines whether migrants are more likely than nonmigrants to have multiple recent sexual partners and not to use condoms with those partners. Results indicate that migation is a critical factor in high-risk sexual behavior and that its importance varies by gender and by the direction of movement. Independent of marital and cohabitation status, social milieu, awareness of AIDS, and other crucial influences on sexual behavior, male migrants between urban areas, and female migrants within rural areas, are much more likely than nonmigrant counterparts to engage in sexual practices conducive to HIV infection. In rural areas, migrants from urban places are more likely than nonmigrants to practice high-risk sex. Given the predominance of men in urban migration and the large volume of circulatory movement between urban and rural areas, these results have serious implications for HIV transmission throughout Kenya

Ethnicity and child mortality in sub-Saharan Africa

Analysis of recent survey data reveals large differentials in child mortality among ethnic groups in countries throughout sub-Saharan Africa. These disparities correspond with the prominence of specific ethnic groups in the national political economy. In many countries where heads of state since independence have come from one or two ethnic groups-as in Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya, and Niger-these groups have experienced levels of early child mortality at least one-third lower than those of other groups. In other countries where there have been several transitions in state control, as in Ghana and Uganda, descendants of precolonial kingdoms such as Ashanti and Buganda have experienced much lower mortality than others. In most countries, the lower mortality of potent ethnic groups-who typically represent small proportions of national populations-is strongly related to economic privilege. Persistent inequalities among African ethnic groups deserve strong consideration in planning economic development and child health strategies

Forum: Parental education and child mortality

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Fewer non‐native insects in freshwater than in terrestrial habitats across continents

Aim Biological invasions are a major threat to biodiversity in aquatic and terrestrial habitats. Insects represent an important group of species in freshwater and terrestrial habitats, and they constitute a large proportion of non-native species. However, while many non-native insects are known from terrestrial ecosystems, they appear to be less represented in freshwater habitats. Comparisons between freshwater and terrestrial habitats of invader richness relative to native species richness are scarce, which hinders syntheses of invasion processes. Here, we used data from three regions on different continents to determine whether non-native insects are indeed under-represented in freshwater compared with terrestrial assemblages. Location Europe, North America, New Zealand. Methods We compiled a comprehensive inventory of native and non-native insect species established in freshwater and terrestrial habitats of the three study regions. We then contrasted the richness of non-native and native species among freshwater and terrestrial insects for all insect orders in each region. Using binomial regression, we analysed the proportions of non-native species in freshwater and terrestrial habitats. Marine insect species were excluded from our analysis, and insects in low-salinity brackish water were considered as freshwater insects. Results In most insect orders living in freshwater, non-native species were under-represented, while they were over-represented in a number of terrestrial orders. This pattern occurred in purely aquatic orders and in orders with both freshwater and terrestrial species. Overall, the proportion of non-native species was significantly lower in freshwater than in terrestrial species. Main conclusions Despite the numerical and ecological importance of insects among all non-native species, non-native insect species are surprisingly rare in freshwater habitats. This is consistent across the three investigated regions. We review hypotheses concerning species traits and invasion pathways that are most likely to explain these patterns. Our findings contribute to a growing appreciation of drivers and impacts of biological invasions

Reduction of the ATPase inhibitory factor 1 (IF1) leads to visual impairment in vertebrates

In vertebrates, mitochondria are tightly preserved energy producing organelles, which sustain nervous system development and function. The understanding of proteins that regulate their homoeostasis in complex animals is therefore critical and doing so via means of systemic analysis pivotal to inform pathophysiological conditions associated with mitochondrial deficiency. With the goal to decipher the role of the ATPase inhibitory factor 1 (IF1) in brain development, we employed the zebrafish as elected model reporting that the Atpif1a−/− zebrafish mutant, pinotage (pnttq209), which lacks one of the two IF1 paralogous, exhibits visual impairment alongside increased apoptotic bodies and neuroinflammation in both brain and retina. This associates with increased processing of the dynamin-like GTPase optic atrophy 1 (OPA1), whose ablation is a direct cause of inherited optic atrophy. Defects in vision associated with the processing of OPA1 are specular in Atpif1−/− mice thus confirming a regulatory axis, which interlinks IF1 and OPA1 in the definition of mitochondrial fitness and specialised brain functions. This study unveils a functional relay between IF1 and OPA1 in central nervous system besides representing an example of how the zebrafish model could be harnessed to infer the activity of mitochondrial proteins during development