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We simulate the quasi-static motion of a spherical particle through a stable, horizontal soap film. The soap film subtends a fixed contact angle, in the range $10-135^\circ$, where it meets the particle. The tension and pressure forces acting on the particle are calculated in two cases: when the film is held within a vertical cylinder, trapping a bubble but otherwise free to move vertically, and when the outer rim of the film is held in a fixed circular wire frame. Film deformation is greater in the second case, and the duration of the interaction therefore increases, increasing the contact time between particle and film. As the soap film returns towards its equilibrium shape following the passage of the particle a small bubble is trapped for contact angles below a threshold value of $90^\circ$. We show that this bubble is larger when the particle is larger and when the contact angle is smaller., Comment: 12 pages

The interaction that occurs between a light solid object and a horizontal soap film of a bamboo foam contained in a cylindrical tube is simulated in 3D. We vary the shape of the falling object from a sphere to a cube by changing a single shape parameter as well as varying the initial orientation and position of the object. We investigate in detail how the soap film deforms in all these cases, and determine the network and pressure forces that a foam exerts on a falling object, due to surface tension and bubble pressure respectively. We show that a cubic particle in a particular orientation experiences the largest drag force, and that this orientation is also the most likely outcome of dropping a cube from an arbitrary orientation through a bamboo foam.

My Rights, My Voice is an innovative four year global programme which aims to engage marginalized children and youth in their rights to health and education services in eight countries – Afghanistan, Georgia, Mali, Nepal, Niger, Pakistan, Tanzania and Vietnam., Children and young people have huge potential to transform their lives and communities. With the right skills, support and opportunities they can be a driving force to break the cycle of poverty so many are born into. To help them achieve their potential, their rights to health and education must be fulfilled., In Mali, My Rights, My Voice experience shows how empowering young people and giving them the space and opportunity to engage directly with duty-bearers can achieve successful national-level advocacy. This case study explores the key learning from this approach.

My Rights, My Voice is an innovative four year global programme which aims to engage marginalized children and youth in their rights to health and education services in eight countries – Afghanistan, Georgia, Mali, Nepal, Niger, Pakistan, Tanzania and Vietnam., Children and young people have huge potential to transform their lives and communities. With the right skills, support and opportunities they can be a driving force to break the cycle of poverty so many are born into. To help them achieve their potential, their rights to health and education must be fulfilled., In Nepal, experience from My Rights, My Voice shows how setting up groups for young people – particularly young women – and empowering them to know and claim their rights can enable them to advocate in a range of innovative and effective ways and make real changes to their local contexts. This case study explores the key learning from this approach.

My Rights, My Voice is an innovative four year global programme which aims to engage marginalized children and youth in their rights to health and education services in eight countries – Afghanistan, Georgia, Mali, Nepal, Niger, Pakistan, Tanzania and Vietnam., Children and young people have huge potential to transform their lives and communities. With the right skills, support and opportunities they can be a driving force to break the cycle of poverty so many are born into. To help them achieve their potential, their rights to health and education must be fulfilled., In Tanzania, working within the formal school system enabled My Rights, My Voice to transform school governance and bring about real improvements in students’ confidence and voice, and the quality of their education.This case study explores the key learning from this approach.

My Rights, My Voice is an innovative four year global programme which aims to engage marginalized children and youth in their rights to health and education services in eight countries – Afghanistan, Georgia, Mali, Nepal, Niger, Pakistan, Tanzania and Vietnam., Children and young people have huge potential to transform their lives and communities. With the right skills, support and opportunities they can be a driving force to break the cycle of poverty so many are born into. To help them achieve their potential, their rights to health and education must be fulfilled., The approach which seems to set My Rights, My Voice apart from many other youth programmes is the way in which it has enabled young people to engage with duty-bearers to advocate for their rights – even in some of the fragile and conservative contexts in which it works. This case study explores the key learning from this approach.

My Rights, My Voice is an innovative four year global programme which aims to engage marginalized children and youth in their rights to health and education services in eight countries – Afghanistan, Georgia, Mali, Nepal, Niger, Pakistan, Tanzania and Vietnam., Children and young people have huge potential to transform their lives and communities. With the right skills, support and opportunities they can be a driving force to break the cycle of poverty so many are born into. To help them achieve their potential, their rights to health and education must be fulfilled., A guiding principal of My Rights, My Voice has been the aspiration to work not simply on youth issues or even for youth (as beneficiaries and recipients of adult interventions), but to support projects which are driven by youth, and to work with youth as co-creators, collaborators and partners. This case study explores the key learning from this approach.

My Rights, My Voice is an innovative four year global programme which aims to engage marginalized children and youth in their rights to health and education services in eight countries – Afghanistan, Georgia, Mali, Nepal, Niger, Pakistan, Tanzania and Vietnam., Children and young people have huge potential to transform their lives and communities. With the right skills, support and opportunities they can be a driving force to break the cycle of poverty so many are born into. To help them achieve their potential, their rights to health and education must be fulfilled., A key feature of the My Rights, My Voice approach to youth engagement has been to develop safe spaces in which young people have been able to learn about their rights to health and education, develop the confidence and skills to speak out, and engage with allies and duty-bearers to advocate around their rights. This case study explores the key learning from this approach.

In 2009, Oxfam took forward a civil society demand for an agricultural insurance scheme against climate risks in Bolivia and worked with international colleagues and local experts to collect information and data supporting the initiative., The government developed a policy for universal agricultural insurance. However, opposition from farmers’ organisations led to the initiative being dropped. When the government showed renewed interest, Oxfam supported a consultation process with a broad alliance of farmers’ organisations and built momentum locally and nationally., As a result, Bolivia now has the legal framework and institutional bodies to implement universal agricultural insurance. A scheme for poor farmers is reaching nearly 700,000 people, and will be rolled out to the rest of Bolivia over the next five years. This $90,000 Oxfam project helped leverage government funds of $4.43m with an expected subsidy of $29m., For more information, refer to our pages on Climate Change and Disaster Risk Reduction or visit Grow.Sell.Thrive. online community.

In Limu, Ethiopia, Oxfam worked with partners and local government to develop a Functional Adult Literacy (FAL) programme for smallholders to enhance women’s economic leadership, increase production and improve the quality of organic coffee. The programme combined literacy classes with training on agricultural and financial capacity-building. This approach increased attendance and improved smallholders’ skills across several areas. To increase attendance among women smallholders, women-only groups were established and class content was adapted to cover their specific needs and areas of interest and influence. For more information, refer to the Women's Economic Leadership page on this site or visit Grow.Sell.Thrive.

The shea sector in Mali is fertile ground for women’s collective action (WCA). Shea production, processing and marketing are almost entirely female-dominated activities, and, in the four villages studied for the WCA research, the shea sector has always been exclusively female. Since the late 1990s, formally recognized associations and cooperatives have emerged out of pre-existing forms of community involvement in the area. The findings from Mali show that in the right conditions, the active participation of women in CA can empower individual women, thereby augmenting their decision-making power and influence within both the household and the community, contributing to lasting changes in gender relations.

Women’s collective action (WCA) has provided significant opportunities for women to increase their role in vegetable markets in Tanzania, and enhances the benefits which they derive from this sector. Women already perform much of the labour needed to grow vegetables, whether in their own households or as casual labourers. However, men own most of the fertile valley land on which vegetables are grown, and dominate the trade to Dar es Salaam and other urban centres within Tanzania and neighbouring countries. Men enjoy correspondingly greater control over incomes from vegetable marketing. Women, on the other hand, generally struggle to raise the funds to invest in land and irrigated vegetable production, and are often prevented from trading over long distances by their domestic responsibilities, and by attitudes which discourage women from sleeping away from home. Research carried out in Lushoto district, Tanzania, shows that involvement in collective action (CA) leads to significant economic benefits to women from vegetable production and marketing. Not only have women members’ incomes increased, but in some cases this has enabled them to invest more in the development of their households and the welfare and education of their children.

At first glance, the honey sector in Ethiopia seems an unlikely place in which to find women forming collective action(CA) groups, taking leadership positions, and benefiting from increased income generation. Beekeeping and honey production are largely male occupations. Over the last decade, however, women have begun to participate in CA in the honey sector in the Amhara region of Ethiopia, and to benefit from their involvement in these groups. This change has been enabled by a number of factors, driven by the growing global demand for honey and bee products. The sector has become an attractive investment opportunity, opening up a space for women and other marginalized smallholder producers to engage with market and state actors. The WCA findings from Ethiopia are particularly exciting, as they suggest that focused interventions by government and development actors really can make a difference when it comes to reaching more marginalized groups of women.

Lysophosphatidylcholine (lyso-Pc) is a lysophospholipid normally found in low concentrations in the lung. At high concentrations lyso-Pc, instilled into the airways, causes pulmonary edema. The hypothesis was tested that the edema caused by lyso-Pc was due to an increase in pulmonary microvascular membrane permeability. In 11 anesthetized dogs, the left lower lobes (LLL) were continuously weighed while lyso-Pc (20 mM) was instilled into the LLL airways. After 30 min, the microvascular membrane fluid filtration coefficient (Kf) was determined from the relationship between the rate of LLL weight gain and the pulmonary microvascular pressure. Kf was not significantly different between the lyso-Pc-treated lobes vs control lobes. The data do not support the hypothesis that lyso-Pc, instilled into the airways, causes an increase in pulmonary microvascular permeability.

Scanning electron microscopy for semiconductor device failure analysis

This report examines the second phase of Oxfam’s Women’s Economic Empowerment and Care (We-Care) programme. The first phase focused on building evidence for influencing policy change on women’s heavy and unequal unpaid care work in six countries. The second phase of the programme seeks to continue deepening the evidence base; strengthen influencing capacity on unpaid care; develop and test new strategies, resources and approaches; and capture and share learning with the development sector on effective influencing., The report also includes progress reports from three countries in which the programme is active: Uganda, Zimbabwe and Ethiopia.

My Rights My Voiice is an innovative programme which aims to unlock young people’s potential by giving them the knowledge, skills and confidence to become ‘active citizens’, able to voice their rights to education and healthcare, and to hold duty bearers to account., Through the MRMV programme, Oxfam and its partners aimed to demonstrate that young people are not just passive bystanders in development, but a positive force for change. Since its inception in 2011, the programme has worked directly with more than 400,000 children and young people in eight countries – Afghanistan, Georgia, Mali, Nepal, Niger, Pakistan, Tanzania and Vietnam., While MRMV officially ends in 2016, it leaves an important legacy – not just in terms of policy changes, but in the lives and futures of the thousands of empowered young people who have the confidence to speak out and work for change.

The 2014 My Rights, My Voice (MRMV) Annual Progress Report provides an overview of the programme’s progress as well as developments and highlights in the third year., Children and youth, especially girls and young women, living in poverty are among the most marginalized and voiceless within society. Almost half the world’s population are under the age of 25 and almost 85 percent of those live in developing countries, yet they are rarely central to decision making processes affecting their lives and do not always have the relevant information about their choices or rights., MRMV is working through partner organizations and directly with marginalized children and youth, their allies and with duty bearers around the world to engage these groups in ways that strengthen and support their voice and rights to health and education, and to ensure that the interests and voices of children and youth will be heard long into the future.

My Rights, My Voice (MRMV) engages marginalized children and youth in their rights to health and education services in eight countries. The 2013 Annual Progress Report provides an overview of the second year of this innovative three year programme and of the MRMV Global Programme Framework, In 2013 the Annual Learning Event, Mid-Term Review process, Strategic Gender Review and Global Advocacy Workshop were important moments of reflection, review, alteration and innovation.These events and processes also highlighted programme challenges, especially in relation to strengthening our gender analysis to ensure we are supporting the specific experiences, needs and aspirations of girls and women., There was significant progress against our four key objectives. The number of young people and their allies reached through awareness-raising messages in 2013 more than trebled to over 207,000 children, youth and their allies (47 per cent girls and young women). Young people also took greater responsibility for awareness-raising activities, educating their peers and allies using a variety of methods and channels, including social media and popular culture., MRMV-supported groups’ organisational skills and ability to develop shared agendas increased. Critically the number of meetings between organised youth groups and duty-bearers doubled to 113., All projects cited examples of duty-bearers recognising child and youth groups as valid bodies to engage, discuss and consult with about health and education services, listening to them and taking initial action as a result of MRMV lobbying and advocacy activities.