Resource Poverty Research Articles

Contraception use among refugee and internally displaced women in Nigeria: A scoping review

Background: Nigeria, which has a large population of displaced women, lacks a current review of literature on the use of modern contraception in this group. This scoping review study aimed to map the literature on contraception use among women of reproductive age (15-49 years) living in refugee and IDP camps in Nigeria in the last five years. Methods: A literature search was conducted for full-text peer-reviewed original research articles published in English, which included women of reproductive age in refugee and internally displaced camps over the last five years. The literature search was conducted in PubMed, Scopus, Google Scholar, and grey literature. Results: Four studies that met the eligibility criteria were selected for the review- one survey, two qualitative studies, and a mixed-methods study. Findings suggest the prevalence of knowledge of modern contraception was reported as 34%, while knowledge of sources of contraception was reported at 24% and 12%. The use of modern contraception was reported at 9% and 21.8%. Underutilization of contraceptives is related to poor knowledge, poor access to health facilities and contraceptives, and misconceptions about contraception. Discussion: The prevalence of knowledge and utilization of modern contraception was low due to factors such as poverty and lack of resources, poor decision-making, and child marriage. Condoms were the most used form of contraception due to their dual purpose. As well, the lack of knowledge about contraception sources was a significant barrier to access. Conclusion: The underutilization of contraception reported calls for health intervention through the provision of health infrastructure including contraceptives for displaced women in Nigeria. More research is recommended on the displaced women in Nigeria.

How to Improve the Efficiency of Financial Inclusion for Poverty Alleviation in China? An Empirical Analysis

ABSTRACT Financial inclusion has emerged as a new strategy to enhance family financial well-being and alleviate poverty in China and substantial financial resources have been devoted into revitalizing rural economic and social development to alleviate poverty. While research on financial usage, financial literacy, and financial well-being has received substantial attention in the consumer and financial industry, there is a significant research gap in the fields of social work and poverty alleviation. The study examined the relationship between financial usage, financial literacy and financial well-being in China utilizing the 2019 China Household Finance Survey data. The findings reveal a positive correlation between financial usage and enhanced financial well-being. Moreover, the study recognized that financial literacy mediates and moderates the relationship between financial usage and financial well-being. These findings indicated the significant role of financial literacy in increasing household per capita income and achieving balance between income and expenditures. However, low-income households not only possess less financial usage, but have lower levels of financial literacy as well compared to non-low-income households. Recognizing this reality, interventions aimed at improving the financial literacy of low-income households become particularly important. These interventions may significantly improve financial inclusion effectiveness in poverty alleviation.

Emprego fora da fazenda e pobreza multidimensional: evidências empíricas da bacia do rio Amarelo na China

ABSTRACT: As an essential way to enhance farmers’ self-development ability, off-farm employment plays an indispensable role in farmers’ multidimensional poverty reduction in many countries. Employing a survey of 1926 farmers in five provinces of the Yellow River Basin in China, this paper examined the multi-dimensional poverty reduction effect of off-farm employment and the heterogeneous influence of different dimensions of off-farm employment (modes, levels, distances and frequency). The results showed that (1) although absolute poverty in the income dimension was largely eliminated in the Yellow River Basin, the poverty in social resources, transportation facilities, employment security were the key bottlenecks restricting farmers’ self-development. (2) The province with the best multidimensional poverty reduction effect for non-farm employment was Shaanxi, with the largest contribution to employment security. (3) Improving off-farm employment level, distance and time can significantly alleviate the multi-dimensional poverty of farmers. Therefore, to lessen the multi-dimensional poverty of farmers in the Yellow River Basin, it is necessary to focus on the governance of multi-dimensional key poverty-stricken areas, such as the middle and upper courses of the Yellow River, adopting multidimensional poverty alleviation strategy of off-farm employment according to local conditions, working on the farmers’ deficiencies in social resources, mobility, employment security, and deepening the effect of off-farm employment on benefiting farmers and helping the poor.

The rights and roles of parents on school governing bodies in South Africa

The South African Schools Act of 1996 mandates the establishment of school governing bodies (SGBs) comprising parents, educators and non-educator members of staff. Since parents form the majority on SGBs they have been placed in a powerful position and are able to influence the school budget, language policy, discipline and the appointment and promotion of teaching and administrative staff. In addition, the new structure of school governance provides the opportunity to establish a new relationship between the state and parents, set a new direction for education, and provide a learning space where the critical skills of civic capacity might be extended. This paper examines the extent to which this has been achieved. Data was obtained by means of a questionnaire completed by parents and teachers, followed by in-depth interviews with selected principals and school governing body members. Findings suggest that problems still exist around issues of marginalisation of black parents in racially mixed schools, levels of education of parent governors, poverty and lack of resources in rural communities and a lack of understanding between governance and management of schools. Ways in which the rights and roles of parents in school governance can be improved are included in the paper.

Reporting Terrorism in the era of Politics and Electioneering in Nigeria

Terrorism is a serious global social phenomenon which has assumed a pandemic dimension. International bodies such as European Union and United Nations have expressed concern about phenomenal rise of terrorists’ activities with unanimous agreement that terrorism is a deliberate act by an individual or group against a country, its institution or its people. The study is anchored on Agenda setting and Framing theories of the media and relies on archival materials, extant literature and media reports in the contemporary Nigeria environment. Terrorism may be triggered by unfair treatment meted out to individual, groups, or institutions, poverty, unequal distribution and utilization of resources, oppression and suppression of the less privileged members or groups in society, etc. Reporting terrorism is a hard nut to crack on the part of the reporter who is entangled in the precarious terrain of the area of assignment and the media organization he/she is working for. The reporter sometimes finds himself/herself in a dilemma as he is faced with the task of reporting facts (not fiction) amid ensuring that the media organization is not offended. The priority of the reporter should be to get the fact of the story and present it in an unbiased and objective manner devoid of suspicion. The impact of terrorism on the citizenry is enormous. Aside the loss in human lives, it can damage its economic, political and social fabrics of the nation. At the professional plank, many journalists have lost their lives in the cause of reporting terrorist acts. The study recommends the reduction of poverty, inequality, promotion of justice and fairness and the rule of law, greater participation in governance, and improvement in intelligence gathering among others. Keywords: Terrorism, reportage, poverty, participatory governance, democracy.

Overlapping governmentalities and the cosmo-politics of Mongolian water- and miningscapes

Since transitioning to a market-based economy, Mongolia has experienced a mining boom that turned extractive industries into a key contributor to the country’s national budget. However, benefits from mining activities are allocated unevenly, with increasing rural poverty and degradation of water resources that threaten the livelihood and health of pastoralists, in particular. Regulatory efforts to improve the protection of water resources are confronted with severe implementation challenges as notions of what constitutes appropriate interpretations of the rules and appropriate ways of behaving diverge.Applying Foucault’s concept of governmentality and tying it to the literature on social imaginaries, I show how different rationalities overlap in Mongolian water- and miningscapes. They shape an extractive imaginary perpetuated by technical- managerial truth claims, an increasing monetization of social and social-environmental relationships, an imperative for industrial-economic development, and a state that performs sovereignty by enforcing procedures rather than substantive laws. However, an alternative, cosmo-political imaginary exists that derives its moral imperatives and individual incentive structures from an understanding that human land-use is contingent on the approval of spiritual entities that inhabit nature. As multiple governmentalities exercise power simultaneously, their interaction produces subjectivities that align with various and contradictory positions towards mining and that require negotiation. This challenges simplistic accounts of a homogeneous ‘state’ or ‘community’, as well as a priori assumptions about the interests and rationalities that motivate the behavior of stakeholders. It thus supports a call for environmental governance research and practice to give more attention to the cognitive-symbolic dimension of social-environmental interactions.

Marketplace platforms as game changers: Internationalization of smaller enterprises

Despite resource constraints, smaller enterprises (SEs) are increasingly participating in international markets and becoming part of the global economy. E-commerce marketplace platforms are propelling this internationalization of SEs by alleviating SEs' resource constraints. However, there is a paucity of research in the nascent area of platform-based internationalization of SEs. Using an abductive inquiry, the study explores how platforms mitigate SEs' resource poverty, provide access to non-location-bound assets, and enable their internationalization. Accordingly, this study enunciates how platform-specific advantages (PSAs) allow for efficient markets through superior economizing of bounded rationality and reliability while assisting SEs with mitigating their liabilities associated with internationalization.

Natural resources policy making through finance? The role of green finance on energy resources poverty

Based on the panel data in China from 2010 to 2019, this study explores the role and mechanism of green finance in alleviating energy poverty and verifies the policy effects of green finance using the regression control method (RCM). The empirical results indicate that if the green finance index is increased by 1 unit, the regional energy poverty level will significantly reduce by 0.08–0.121 units. Green finance significantly suppresses energy poverty by restricting energy-intensive industrial development, improving energy efficiency, and promoting energy structure adjustment. The effectiveness of green finance pilot policy in different regions differs remarkably. The green finance pilot policy implementation in Guangdong and Xinjiang has significantly alleviated the local energy poverty, while the policy effect in Zhejiang, Jiangxi and Guizhou is insignificant. This study broadens the research paradigm of “finance and energy” in theory, and it provides a new idea for countries to explore the establishment of a green finance system and tap its value in promoting sustainable energy consumption.

Dependency-Aware Task Scheduling in TrustZone Empowered Edge Clouds for Makespan Minimization

Task offloading to edge servers has become a promising solution to tackle the computation resource poverty of the end devices. However, the zero-trust edge computing platform is highly challenged by the growing concern on security and privacy. Thus, Trust Execution Environment (TEE), like TrustZone, is advocated to empower edge clouds to enable secure task offloading. To explore TrustZone, the inevitable involvement of data encryption and decryption operations makes existing offloading strategies not applicable any more, especially when the task dependency is considered. In addition, TrustZone has distinguishable task scheduling paradigm as one CPU core does not allow multitask coexist at the same time. Taking the above issues into consideration, we investigate a dependency-aware task offloading problem for makespan minimization in TrustZone empowered edge clouds. By inventing an extended graph to describe the task execution process, we provide a formal statement to the problem and prove its NP-hardness. We then propose a Customized List Scheduling (CLS) based approximate algorithm and theoretically analyze its achievable performance. Extensive testbed based experiment results show that our approximation algorithm can effectively reduce the makespan and significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art offloading approaches in TrustZone empowered edge clouds.

The rise of COVID-19 terms in English and Romanian. Translation challenges

Following the COVID-19 pandemic, linguists and terminologists in particular are confronted with a lot of challenges in translating new terminology. This has to do with a mass communication that is largely centred around English. The sometimes-sudden creation of new terms as a response to the new realities is one of the reasons behind these challenges. So, it is only fitting to research these attempts to offer equivalents for these newly-coined English terms posing problems to Romanian translators. This article aims to investigate in more detail the terminology related to the coronavirus pandemic, as a means to contributing to the rise of valid Romanian versions of English terminology specific for the coronavirus pandemic, keeping in mind that terms are “dynamically equivalent”. Our reasoning behind the investigation of the coronavirus-related vocabulary and its translation from English into Romanian (mainly via Google Translate) is to look into the issue of poverty of linguistic resources employed to adequately translate these terms. An analysis of the coronavirus pandemic-related terminology shows that Romanian equivalents for the newly-coined English terms is either missing of awkward sounding. We are going to investigate the several reasons for this. Our belief is that the main reason has to do with the fact that most of the available information about COVID-19, irrespective of its medium (blogs, social media content, articles), is in English. If we are to compare this to what happens in case of machine translation use, then the outcome is in certain cases quite infelicitous.

PASTO: Enabling Secure and Efficient Task Offloading in TrustZone-Enabled Edge Clouds

Offloading tasks to edge servers has been regarded as a potential way to solve the computation resource poverty problem of the end devices like autonomous vehicles. However, due to the sharing and openness features of edge computing, it raises severe security problems. In order to combat such issues, Trust Execution Environment (TEE), such as TrustZone, is advocated to strength the security of task offloading to edge computing in the hardware level. For the exploration of TrustZone, the inevitable involvement of cryptographic operations make existing offloading strategies not applicable, or not efficient enough, any more. In addition, TrustZone does not allow multiple tasks to coexist and execute on one CPU core at the same time. Taking the above issues into consideration, we investigate a secure task offloading problem for minimizing the total task completion time under the constraint of energy budget. To address this problem, we propose a Priority-aware Secure Task Offloading (PASTO) algorithm and evaluate the performance of PASTO by both numerical analysis and prototype based experiments. All the experiment results show that PASTO can effectively reduce the total task completion time in comparison with other state-of-the-art offloading approaches in TrustZone-enabled edge clouds.

What was the main factor in successful control of ascariasis in Korea?

In the l950s, under the legacy of traditional agriculture, Ascaris lumbricoides, spread epidemically in the war-bitten society of Korea. Consensus on the parasite control was drafted in the Parasite Disease Prevention Act, which passed a parliamentary agreement in 1966, and established safe disposal of feces and mass chemotherapy as control strategies. Biannual stool examinations and treating infected schoolchildren were basic scheme of the control activity through which revenue could be secured for organized business. In the 27 years following 1969, a maximum of 16 million stool examinations had been done every year. Cellophane thick smear enabled the task. The infection declined remarkably in the 1970s when industrialization and green revolution proceeded. A population study of A. lumbricoides in the late 1970s helped us better understand its epidemiology. The data also settled down the understandable protest of teachers against the repeated stool examinations. In the 9 years following 1987, the target population was gradually reduced when the egg positive rate was below 0.1%. An article in the Korean Law, stipulating obligatory stool examinations, was made optional. Although the long-term Korean effort of Ascaris control was a success, the effect of mass chemotherapy was not as succinct in terms of lowering reinfection. In the period of control, Korean agricultural technology changed, and the economy grew and supplied sanitary facilities by which the vicious cycle was disconnected. Reduction of morbidity was a benefit of mass chemotherapy, which is the only control method feasible in economically difficult countries. The most important hurdle of parasite control in the 1960s was poverty of general population and limited financial resources in Korea but the society formed a consensus on the priority of intestinal helminthiasis control during the ordeal period. The national consensus in the 1960s was the critical milestone for Ascaris control in Korea. Under the social agreement, application of timely technical and research advancements in parasitology achieved the success of ascariasis elimination. The successful experience of ascariasis elimination in Korea can be a benchmark for countries where neglected tropical diseases are endemically recycled.

A Hierarchical Analysis Approach to Analyzing Global Equity through the Quality of Life of Newborns

This paper explores the highly subjective issue of global equity and presents two models for defining and measuring it over time. The paper makes several basic assumptions to simplify the problem, including using various child indicators to evaluate quality of life, subjectively assessing their impact, and weighting them to obtain the quality-of-life value. The paper defines absolute and relative fairness and shows how the quality of life of newborns correlates with equity. The models use the Analytic Hierarchy Process and quality-of-life values to identify factors that affect equity and assess it between different countries. The paper validates the models using historical data and existing conclusions. Overall, the paper provides a framework for evaluating and improving global equity that can help address issues such as poverty, environmental pollution, and lack of resources.

Preparation of Two Participatory Social Housing Interventions in a Marginalised Roma Community in Romania

The first desegregation efforts in the marginalised and segregated communities in the Pata-Rât area were carried out within the frames of two social housing projects (between 2014–2017 and 2020–2023). Although a housing first methodology would have been more adequate in the context of a marginalised community, given the shortcomings of the Romanian social assistance system, implementation was impossible. In this context, it was necessary to develop a system to access social housing but also to create a reasonably ‘fair process’ at the community level. Thus, in both interventions, the starting point for developing the social housing criteria was to survey the community in order to explore the community members’ preferences regarding the criteria to be considered in the selection of the beneficiary families for the social houses. The surveys covered all the inhabitants of the Pata-Rât area, that is 219 households in the first survey and 282 households in the second. The survey results served as the basis for the development of the criteria for accessing social housing. In this article, we present and discuss the results of the community surveys from 2016 and from 2020, the year of the pandemic outbreak. Differences were found in the prioritisation of criteria, with an increasing preference for those reflecting vulnerability/needs (e.g., number of children, years spent in the community, disability) and decreasing preference for the ones indicating family resources (e.g., employment, income, education). These differences reflect the increase in poverty and loss of resources occurring in the community during this period, due both to the COVID-19 pandemic, and to the relocation of the 35 better-off families in the first Pata-Cluj project.

Analisis Social Return On Investment (SROI) dalam Penerapan Program Ketahanan Ekonomi dan Pangan Rumah Tangga Desa Dendang

Business activities in the current era are not only profit-oriented but highlight the value of sustainability. Due to global problems such as poverty and limited availability of resources, a sustainable company means that the company can maintain and improve the environmental life around the company. One of the company's efforts to create business sustainability is through a corporate sustainability strategy or the implementation of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and a form of business ethics and social investment. To determine the effectiveness of a program, carried out an evaluation. This study aims to analyze the CSR program of PT SMM by using the Social Return On Investment (SROI) method. This study uses a qualitative descriptive approach to describe the implementation of PT SMM's CSR program and analyze the success of the program through the results of the SROI value. The results of the SROI calculation in this program show a ratio of 7.84, meaning that every investment made by PT SMM is Rp. 1,- getting a benefit of Rp. 7.8,-. This program can be categorized as successful because it can exceed the ratio of 1 in the SROI. If viewed from the economic, social, and environmental aspects, this program has good sustainability potential and deserves to be continued.

Role of financial inclusion and green resources for alleviating energy poverty in the Republic of Korea

Energy poverty has become a severe challenge to countries, and policymakers are trying to implement different policies to overcome the challenge of energy poverty. This paper primarily explores the nexus between financial inclusion, green energy resource deployment, and energy resource poverty in the Republic of Korea. To this end, the annual data from 1990 to 2021 are gathered and analyzed through the ARDL (Autoregressive Distributed Lag) technique. According to the empirical findings, financial inclusion positively reduces energy poverty in the short term. Sustainable energy resource consumption significantly affects energy poverty alleviation in the short and long term. The electricity tariff is the factor that aggravates energy poverty in the short and long term. The paper has new insights for scholars and recommends green financing of sustainable power generation, establishing the elderly financial inclusion system, and planning at the regional level for policymakers.

TRAINING IN START-UPS TO ACTIVATE TOURISM ACTIVITY IN ALGERIA: BETWEEN REALITY AND HOPE

This research paper aims to shed light on the reality start-ups in Algeria and in various sectors, by presenting the most important characteristics that distinguish them from other types of enterprises; With a focus on highlighting and demonstrating the importance that the Algerian government attaches to supporting and accompanying the owners of innovative projects, by explaining its effective role in raising economic growth, reducing the specter of poverty, unemployment and depletion of natural resources, in addition to preserving the environment. This paper, in its entirety, also seeks to present the reality of training in these institutions, as well as the extent of interest in and evaluation of it. As well as an attempt to identify the most important obstacles facing the implementation of the stages of the formative process, including an attempt to find out the extent of the contribution of emerging institutions in supporting and activating one of the most promising activities in Algeria represented in the tourism activity as a strategic option for economic diversification, and in order to embody this, the statistical approach was used in its descriptive and analytical styles. This is due to its suitability to the nature of the study. The research paper concluded with a set of results, most notably that emerging institutions play a pivotal and prominent role in modernizing and keeping abreast of developments in various fields of life, especially in the field of tourism, given the innovative and creative nature of this type of institution. The study also concluded that the main goal of any emerging institution lies in growth and survival and ensuring its continuity and success in the market. This inevitably contributes to the realization of the project, and to raising its efficiency and effectiveness for the advancement of the tourism sector in Algeria. In turn, this is what the state also aspires to by encouraging this through its enactment of a number of rules and laws, and its taking of procedures and measures to activate, on the one hand, tourism activity despite the difficulties and challenges that impede the implementation of this, and on the other hand, the success of these institutions because of the importance they represent in activating the pace of national development

Assessment of Awareness and Nutritional Status of Rural Community: A Cross Sectional Study

Background: COVID-19 Pandemic had led to an unprecedented emergency which led to many transformations in all aspects of life including dietary practices. A good and balanced die played a crucial role in prevention of disease and faster recovery. For a good dietary practice, knowledge and awareness is needed. Even the SDG 2 deals with food, nutrition and curbing with hunger. The purpose of this study was to explore the awareness of good dietary habits and the nutritional content of everyday meals among rural communities as well as to assess the nutritional status and physical activity.
 Methods: This was a observational cross-sectional study conducted amongst the community of from two rural zones in Jalgaon district, Maharashtra in April to June 2022. Convenience sampling with the sample size as 40 households residing in the community was used. The head of the family of each household were surveyed using a pre-designed and pre-tested structured questionnaire. The tool used to explore the daily food consumption, assessment of nutritional status and physical activities of the participants. The study also determined at people's awareness of what a balanced diet is and the concept/effects of malnutrition in addition to anthropometric measurements. Data was entered in spreadsheet and analysis was done with the Microsoft excel using descriptive statistics.
 Results: Of those surveyed, regarding nutritional awareness, it was found that 92% and 82% of the subjects have not even heard of the term "Balanced diet" and “Malnutrition” respectively. The BMI ranges of the study subjects, showed that majority (22, 55%) of the study participants had normal BMI, followed by (13, 32.5%) as underweight i.e. BMI below 18.5 and (5; 12.5%) as pre-obese category, i.e. BMI above 25. It was observed that the individuals used to undertake around 8 hrs of physical activity per day on an average. Regarding the diet pattern, it was noted that rural communities still follow follows traditional wisdom of a balanced diet from ancestral roots. Due to poverty and lack of resources, they tend to stick to whatever is affordable and locally available.
 Conclusion: Considering the significant unawareness regarding nutrition and balanced diet as observed, we conclude that the Government’ plans and efforts around food security will be more successful if raising public awareness about the significance of nutrition and food is the first step in this regard. The right to food and the right to health can only reach the rural areas when the awareness index in these areas is enhanced by utilizing all available tools and approaches.

Privacy‐preserving enhanced dummy‐generation technique for location‐based services

SummaryLocation‐based services (LBS) has become an intrinsic part of our everyday life. However, the flexibility and convenience provided by LBS are at the cost of user privacy since untrusted LBS server can leak private information of users. To overcome the privacy issues observed in LBS, a novel dummy‐generation based privacy preservation technique is proposed in this article. The proposed dummy‐generation technique is a circle‐based technique which generates dummy locations in the circle area and is effective against center‐of‐anonymized spatial region attack, map‐matching attack, and location‐homogeneity attack. Additionally, an edge computing enabled framework is proposed, which can be used in the IoT environment. The edge computing enabled framework helps in handling the resource poverty issues of the service requesting devices and provides the low latency solution. The security analysis of our proposed dummy‐generation technique reflects that the proposed technique is resilient to specific attacks for different adversary attack models. The results obtained through simulations suggest that our technique performs better than the pre‐existing techniques.

Effect of Different Nano-NPK Fertilizers on Vegetative Growth Parameter and Soil Microbial Activity of Fig Crop under Different Irrigation Regims

World face several challenges the most decisive climatic changes , freshwater poverty and poor usage efficiency for natural resources (soil & water) particularly in developing countries.
 Applying Nanotechnology may represent a smart mechanism toward sustainable agricultural. Much efforts have been exerted to utilizing nano-technology and producing agro-chemicals in nano-form i.e, nano-fertilizers and nano-pesticides.
 Current work that carried out in greenhouse belong pomology department , National Research Centre, Cairo, Egypt during 2020/2021, aims to assessing impact of nano-fertilizers on growth performance and soil microbial activity under different drought stress levels. NPK-nano-fetrilizer was applied on uniform one-year old fig seedlings, as foliar application at two levels (200 and 400ppm) compared with traditional NPK fertilizer, under three levels of water regimes (once, twice and three times irrigation weekly. Obtained results indicated that under drought stress nano-fertilizers enhanced fig seedlings growth performance and nutrient content. Moreover, nano-fertilizer raised antioxidant enzyme activity that work on scavenging active oxygen species and thereby reinforce drought stress tolerance in plants. Besides, nano-fertilizer had a positive impact on soil microbial under low soil moisture. This study came in chain of studies which proved the efficiency of nano-fertilizer under drought stress with no negative impact on environments under this study conditions. This study concluded that nano-fertilizer has a bright future particularly under challenges that face the world (climatic changes, poverty of water resources, soil degradation and global food famine risk with fast growing of population) toward sustainable agriculture with low risk on environment.