Predictors of Underweight among Children Under-five in Ethiopia

9013 under-five children were included for study. Descriptive Statistics and POM were employed identify socio-economic, demographic, and proximate factors of underweight to children among regions of Ethiopia. SAS version 9.4 was used. About 25.3% of children in Ethiopia were underweighted. POM showed that sex, residence, size at birth, age group, incidence of diarrhea, educational level, breastfeeding status, mothers’ employment status, and birth order were found to be significant factors of underweight. Improvement of education for caring child in appropriate age needed. Personal hygiene be improved to prevent exposures to diarrhea and environmental sanitation.

Côte d’Ivoire

Côte d’Ivoire first experienced a civil war in 2002, but the country’s rapid socio-political disintegration after the demise of Félix Houphouët-Boigny in 1993 produced several risk factors that would eventually culminate in atrocity crimes between 2010 and 2011. This article identifies a weak state that only exercised jurisdiction over the south of the country, years of instability driven by horizontal inequalities and an identity crisis, past abuses that had gone unpunished, and election disputes that served as triggers for atrocity crimes. The deeply polarized nature of Ivorian society meant that local mechanisms for resolving disputes and building peace were not wholly effective, even though they helped to resolve disputes and prevent violence in some local communities. Findings from the Ivorian case demonstrate the need to pay closer attention to the structural and proximate factors that underpin conflicts. Côte d’Ivoire also presents lessons on the need for decisive action in the face of unfolding atrocity crimes. There was a need for timely and decisive response in accordance with the principles of R2P. Nonetheless military intervention was delayed for months, resulting in avoidable fatalities.

Climate change and plant reproduction: trends and drivers of mast seeding change

Climate change is reshaping global vegetation through its impacts on plant mortality, but recruitment creates the next generation of plants and will determine the structure and composition of future communities. Recruitment depends on mean seed production, but also on the interannual variability and among-plant synchrony in seed production, the phenomenon known as mast seeding. Thus, predicting the long-term response of global vegetation dynamics to climate change requires understanding the response of masting to changing climate. Recently, data and methods have become available allowing the first assessments of long-term changes in masting. Reviewing the literature, we evaluate evidence for a fingerprint of climate change on mast seeding and discuss the drivers and impacts of these changes. We divide our discussion into the main characteristics of mast seeding: interannual variation, synchrony, temporal autocorrelation and mast frequency. Data indicate that masting patterns are changing but the direction of that change varies, likely reflecting the diversity of proximate factors underlying masting across taxa. Experiments to understand the proximate mechanisms underlying masting, in combination with the analysis of long-term datasets, will enable us to understand this observed variability in the response of masting. This will allow us to predict future shifts in masting patterns, and consequently ecosystem impacts of climate change via its impacts on masting. This article is part of the theme issue ‘The ecology and evolution of synchronized seed production in plants’.

Fitness and Power: The Contribution of Genetics to the History of Differential Reproduction

Textual evidence from pre-modern societies supports the prediction that status differences among men translate to variance in reproductive success. In recent years, analysis of genetic data has opened up new ways of studying this relationship. By investigating cases that range over several millennia, these analyses repeatedly document the replacement of local men by newcomers and reveal instances of exceptional reproductive success of specific male lineages. These findings suggest that violent population transfers and conquests could generate considerable reproductive advantages for male dominants. At the same time, this does not always seem to have been the case. Moreover, it is difficult to link such outcomes to particular historical characters or events, or to identify status-biased reproductive inequalities within dominant groups. The proximate factors that mediated implied imbalances in reproductive success often remain unclear. A better understanding of the complex interplay between social power and genetic fitness will only arise from sustained transdisciplinary engagement.

Women’s Empowerment and Community Norms Association on Women’s Access to Health Facility Delivery in Ethiopia. A Multilevel Analysis.

Background Health-care facility delivery was the most critical in ensuring the provision of high-quality care and a distribution location that was ready in the case of an emergency for reproductive women. However, maternal mortality remains high in African nations, and the majority of women were still giving birth at home. This study was aimed to determine whether women's empowerment and community norms, plus other proximate factors, are related to the health facility delivery utilization of women in Ethiopia. Methods The data for this study was taken from the Performance Monitoring for Action (PMA) in Ethiopia of the 2019 cross-sectional survey. A weighted sample of 4864 women with at least one birth history, clustered within 264 clusters was used for this study. The impact of women's empowerment, cultural norms, and other proximate factors on the use of health facility deliveries among reproductive-age women across clusters in Ethiopia was studied using a two-level multilevel logistic regression. Results In Ethiopia, around 51 % of women were delivered their most recent child at the health facility. The use of a health facility delivery was more common among empowered women and those living in where the most people encourage a health facility delivery. Older women were less likely to deliver at a health facility and women from the highest wealth quantile more likely to have a facility delivery. Those women with higher education and living in an urban area were more likely to have a health facility delivery. Women’s chances of giving birth in health facilities vary significantly across the 264 clusters of Ethiopia ( σ_uo^2 =2.49,p.value<0.001). Conclusions This study emphasizes the importance of women's empowerment and cultural norms in enhancing maternal health outcomes of women in Ethiopia. It is more important than ever that the government and development agency should invest more in women's empowerment and raising community consciousness about the benefits of using health facility delivery as part of a strategic intervention to improve maternal health outcomes.

Ecophysiology of egg rejection in hosts of avian brood parasites: new insights and perspectives

Egg rejection is the most effective and widespread defence used by host species to counteract the extreme fitness costs frequently imposed by obligate avian brood parasites. Yet, the proximate mechanisms underlying between- and within-individual variation in host responses remain poorly explored. Emerging evidence suggests that egg rejection is dependent on individual physiological state, and draws attention to the role of hormones as mediators of flexible antiparasitic responses. In this perspective article, I outline recent advances in our understanding of the proximate factors that mediate egg rejection. I also point out some areas where knowledge remains still lacking, especially those related to the development and maintenance of effective cognitive functions, the potential role of oxidative stress, immunological state and developmental stressors. I propose new hypotheses that stimulate future research on behavioural host responses towards brood parasitism.

Climate change and plant reproduction: trends and drivers of mast seeding change

Climate change is reshaping global vegetation through its impacts on plant mortality, but recruitment creates the next generation of plants and will determine the structure and composition of future communities. Recruitment depends on mean seed production, but also on the interannual variability and among-plant synchrony in seed production, the phenomenon known as mast seeding. Thus, predicting the long-term response of global vegetation dynamics to climate change requires understanding the response of masting to changing climate. Recently, data and methods have become available allowing the first assessments of long-term changes in masting. Reviewing the literature, we evaluate evidence for a fingerprint of climate change on mast seeding and discuss the drivers and impacts of these changes. We divide our discussion into the main characteristics of mast seeding: interannual variation, synchrony, temporal autocorrelation, and mast frequency. Data indicate that masting patterns, are changing, but the direction of that change varies, likely reflecting the diversity of proximate factors underlying masting across taxa. Experiments to understand the proximate mechanisms underlying masting, in combination with the analysis of long-term datasets, will enable us to understand this observed variability in the response of masting. This will allow us to predict future shifts in masting patterns, and consequently ecosystem impacts of climate change via its impacts on masting.

Democratic Legacies, the Associational Landscape, and Democratic Survival

A simple cross-tabulation of experience with minimalist democracy before 1918 and interwar democratic breakdown reveals a manifest empirical pattern: All the old democracies of north-western Europe and the former British settler colonies survived the interwar crises. Moreover, in Latin America the countries with democratic legacies experienced longer spells of interwar democracy. A subsequent statistical analysis demonstrates that the strength of the associational landscape is robustly associated with interwar patterns of democratic breakdown even when we control for a number of structural and institutional factors. Finally, both democratic legacies and the vibrancy of associational landscapes were strongly associated with deeper background conditions. These findings indicate that deeper structures shaped the baseline risk of interwar democratic breakdown, but also that it was the more proximate factors of democratic experience and vibrant associational landscapes, which translated structural conditions into either democratic resilience or fragility.