Oxfam’s Food Security for Tanzania Farmers Programme: Guidelines for Achieving the Double Boon

The Oxfam Food Security for Tanzania Farmers programme (2012–15) aimed to increase food production and income, and improve the quality of life and food security for smallholder farmers, particularly women, in Tanzania. In Lushoto and Korogwe districts, it focused in particular on the domestic vegetable value chain (VVC), where rates of women’s participation are lower as compared to other agricultural crop production. In 2015–17, the project ‘Balancing unpaid care work and paid work: successes, challenges and lessons for women’s economic empowerment programmes and policies’ investigated how women’s economic empowerment (WEE) policies and programmes take unpaid care work into account, in order to enable women’s economic empowerment to be optimised. How does access to decent work play a key role in enabling women to achieve a ‘double boon’ through their participation in economically empowering work? This note discusses the main findings of the research in relation to the care-sensitivity of the Oxfam programme. It offers recommendations to Oxfam on how unpaid care work can be mainstreamed into its WEE programming, particularly by: helping to set up and maintain women’s groups to enable collective action; sharing its knowledge and experience to support other organisations in this kind of work; helping women lobby for increased access to markets; enabling women to campaign for better public services and infrastructure; helping families plan and redistribute the division of care tasks of household members; and encouraging families to send their children to school, discouraging the transfer of onerous care tasks that disrupt schooling.Department for International Development (DFID)William and Flora Hewlett FoundationInternational Development Research Centre (IDRC

Making Women Development Fund More Care-Responsive

The Women Development Fund (WDF) was established by the Government of Tanzania in 1992, with the objective to support the economic empowerment of women, and especially rural women. This note discusses the main findings of research in relation to the care-sensitivity of the WDF. The research was undertaken by the Institute of Development Studies and BRAC Research and Evaluation Unit, and implemented in Korogwe and Lushoto districts. The research hypothesis argues that taking unpaid care work into account in women’s economic empowerment (WEE) policies and programmes has the potential to significantly strengthen the empowering outcomes of women’s participation in paid work. This would therefore turn a ‘double burden’ into a ‘double boon’ – i.e. paid work that empowers women and provides more support for their unpaid care work responsibilities. The note provides a set of recommendations to the WDF on how to mainstream unpaid care work into women’s economic empowerment (WEE) programming, which include: providing a convenient platform for engaging with issues related to the reduction and redistribution of unpaid care work; exchanging lessons learned and best practices, and establishing synergies with other like-minded programmes active in Tanzania; lobbying for increasing the government’s investment in public services and better infrastructure; and expanding women’s access to markets and finance.Department for International Development (DFID)William and Flora Hewlett FoundationInternational Development Research Centre (IDRC

Connecting Perspectives on Women’s Empowerment

With the formulation of the first ever internationally agreed stand-alone goal on gender equality, debates around women’s empowerment are at a critical juncture. This IDS Bulletin makes a timely contribution to our understanding of how ideas around empowerment have evolved and how we can move forward to expand women’s opportunities and choices and realise women’s empowerment in a meaningful way. Even though the importance of women’s empowerment is widely accepted, it remains a complex concept that defies precise definitions and easy measurements. Together, the articles in this special Archive Collection demonstrate the depth and breadth of a nuanced analysis of empowerment that has come out of academic scholars writing at the cutting edge of this field. The editors reflect on the interconnectedness of the economic, social and political components of empowerment. In doing so they highlight the significant gaps in policy and programming aimed at furthering processes and outcomes for women’s empowerment. Casting an eye to the future, they draw our attention to two relevant debates that merit further unpacking – that of inequality, and the question of how the Sustainable Development Goals can contribute to furthering processes of women’s empowerment and gender equality. Ultimately this IDS Bulletin reminds us that empowerment – implying an expansion of opportunities and the power to make choices – can only be realised through a collective, rather than individualised notion of empowerment that focuses on addressing structural inequality and inequitable power relations, and gives primacy to women’s agency in negotiating and challenging these structures

Selective Attention to Task-Irrelevant Emotional Distractors Is Unaffected by the Perceptual Load Associated with a Foreground Task

A number of studies have shown that emotionally arousing stimuli are preferentially processed in the human brain. Whether or not this preference persists under increased perceptual load associated with a task at hand remains an open question. Here we manipulated two possible determinants of the attentional selection process, perceptual load associated with a foreground task and the emotional valence of concurrently presented task-irrelevant distractors. As a direct measure of sustained attentional resource allocation in early visual cortex we used steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEPs) elicited by distinct flicker frequencies of task and distractor stimuli. Subjects either performed a detection (low load) or discrimination (high load) task at a centrally presented symbol stream that flickered at 8.6 Hz while task-irrelevant neutral or unpleasant pictures from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS) flickered at a frequency of 12 Hz in the background of the stream. As reflected in target detection rates and SSVEP amplitudes to both task and distractor stimuli, unpleasant relative to neutral background pictures more strongly withdrew processing resources from the foreground task. Importantly, this finding was unaffected by the factor ‘load’ which turned out to be a weak modulator of attentional processing in human visual cortex

Sex Education in the Digital Era

Exploring sex and sexual relationships is an important part of adolescence, and therefore sex education should have a central role in adolescent emotional development as well as dealing with crucial public-health issues. Good sex education reduces maternal and child mortality by helping to prevent unwanted, early and risky pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases, yet in many parts of the world unmarried teenagers are excluded from receiving information and sexual health services because – according to unrealistic and conservative religious and socio-cultural norms – they are not supposed to be sexually active. Much of the research on sexuality in the digital era is moralistic and slanted, so for those working on sexual/reproductive health and youth/digital development issues, learning more about the subject is a major challenge. There has never been a collection of scholarly work on this topic for a mixed audience of researchers, policymakers and practitioners until this issue of the IDS Bulletin. A collaboration between Love Matters and IDS, articles discuss experiences with digital sex education in many countries and in a range of settings. The issues confronted are diverse, yet the common themes encountered are often as striking as the differences. Young people need help in critically examining the sexual messages they receive, as well as access to new types of digital sex education environments that are realistic, emotionally attuned, non-judgemental and open to the messages they themselves create. Contributions in this IDS Bulletin suggest an urgency for academics and practitioners to understand and develop digital literacy skills in order to help build such environments

Introduction: Sex Education in the Digital Era

Young people all over the world are keen to learn about sex and relationships but are not finding the information they seek in their immediate environment. The internet provides them with a welcome alternative. In response to the rapid increased connectivity of young people, international organisations that work on comprehensive sex education for young people have moved online. While there are new opportunities to reach young people in these digital spaces, sex educators also encounter restrictions. They face the immense power of new supranational commercial digital gatekeepers such as Facebook and Google and must respond to digitally mediated sexual and gender-based violence. This article introduces a special issue of the IDS Bulletin on experiences with internet‑based sex education in 14 countries. The authors explore how familiar forms of exclusion and inequality, as well as empathy and solidarity, manifest themselves in these new digital spaces in highly diverse national settings

The NADPH oxidase NOX2 plays a role in periodontal pathologies

Oxidative stress plays an important role in periodontal health and disease. The phagocyte nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide phosphate oxidase NOX2 is most likely one of the key sources of reactive oxygen species (ROS) in periodontal tissues. This review will discuss three clinical aspects of NOX2 function. We will first focus on oral pathology in NOX2 deficiency such as chronic granulomatous disease (CGD). CGD patients are thought to suffer from infections and sterile hyperinflammation in the oral cavity. Indeed, the periodontium appears to be the most common site of infection in CGD patients; however, as periodontitis is also common in the general population, it is not clear to which extent these infections can be attributed to the disease. Secondly, the role of oxidative stress in periodontal disease of diabetic patients will be reviewed. Diabetes is indeed a major risk factor to develop periodontal disease, and increased activity of leukocytes is commonly observed. Enhanced NOX2 activity is likely to be involved in the pathomechanism, but data remains somewhat preliminary. The strongest case for involvement of NOX2 in periodontal diseases is aggressive periodontitis. Increased ROS generation by leukocytes from patients with aggressive periodontitis has clearly been documented. This increased ROS generation is to be caused by two factors: (1) genetically enhanced ROS generation and (2) oral pathogens that enhance NOX function. NOX enzymes in the oral cavity have so far received little attention but are likely to be important players in this setting. New therapies could be derived from these new concept

Why Do Women Philosophy Students Drop Out of Philosophy? Some Evidence from the Classroom at the Bachelor’s Level

It is well known that there has been a steady and significant underrepresentation of women in philosophy on different professional levels. Numerous hypotheses explaining this underrepresentation have been suggested, but empirical analyses are not yet extensive. In particular, studies of the phenomenon in different countries are nonexistent. In this paper, we present findings from an exploratory study in which we analyze the interests, abilities, beliefs, attitudes, perceptions, and goals of bachelor’s students in a semester-long philosophy of science course at a major German university. We furthermore make the first attempt to compare women-only learning environments with mixed-gender learning environments. Our results suggest that while there are generally some gender differences regarding interests, abilities, beliefs, attitudes, perceptions, and goals of students in the classroom, most of the hypotheses we explore to explain dropout rates by gender differences cannot be supported. We conclude that possible factors leading to the underrepresentation of women in philosophy in Germany might be found in the social and institutional environment within which philosophy is taught