Increased women's empowerment and regional inequality in Sub-Saharan Africa between 1995 and 2015.

Women's empowerment is a fundamental human right but attempts to measure progress in this area have been limited. We used 142 nationally representative surveys to quantify empowerment in six domains (Intimate Partner Violence, Family Planning, Reproductive Healthcare, Employment, Education, and Decision-Making) for first-level subdivisions of all countries in Sub-Saharan Africa for three years (1995, 2005, and 2015). The possible value for each domain ranged between zero (worst) and one (best).

The Female Empowerment Index (FEMI): spatial and temporal variation in women's empowerment in Nigeria.

Improving female empowerment is an important human rights and development goal that needs better monitoring. A number of indices have been developed to track female empowerment at the national level, but these are incomplete and may obscure important sub-national variation. We developed the Female Empowerment Index (FEMI) to track multiple domains of women's empowerment at the sub-national level.

Measuring the Costs of Vitamin A Interventions: Institutional, Spatial, and Temporal Issues in the Context of Cameroon.

Background: To address vitamin A (VA) deficiency, an array of interventions have been developed for increasing VA status among young children. With numerous possible combinations of interventions, however, comes the need to take decisions regarding which intervention or combination of interventions is most cost effective for achieving VA deficiency reduction targets.

Methods: Detailed intervention-specific, "macro-region"-level data in Cameroon are used to generate estimates of the costs associated with delivering VA to children aged 6 to 59 months.

Use of Optimization Modeling for Selecting National Micronutrient Intervention Strategies: An Example Based on Potential Programs for Control of Vitamin A Deficiency in Cameroon.

Vitamin and mineral (micronutrient [MN]) deficiencies are common in lower income countries, especially among young children and women of reproductive age. These deficiencies are cause for serious concern because of their high prevalence and their associated complications, which include depressed immune function and increased risk and severity of infections, impaired neurocognitive development, and anemia, which together result in elevated mortality and reduced human productive capacity. A broad range of different intervention strategies are available to control MN deficiencies.