The study examined the vulnerability of teenage girls to pregnancy in Ibarapa Central local government area of Oyo state, Nigeria. Simple random sampling was used to select 140 teenage girls for the study. Both qualitative and quantitative methods of data collection were used to elicit information from the respondents. While Interview Schedule was used to collect quantitative data, Focus Group Discussion Guide and In-depth Interview was used to gather qualitative data. Data were analysed using a descriptive method of analysis. Analysis of the data obtained showed that the average age of teenage girls in the study area was 15 years; the majority were Yoruba ethnic group (96.7%), lived with their relatives (77.5%) reside in multi-unit flats (62.2%) and had a primary education (76.1%). Results obtained from Focus Group Discussion and In-depth Interviews revealed causes of teenage pregnancy in the study area as: poor parental care, poverty, single parenting, peer-group, disciplinary actions from parents, the advent of technology and civilization. The study, therefore, recommends the need for enlightenment programmes on sex education by government agencies and non-governmental organizations for teenagers, parents as well as the general community.
AbstractIn recent years, a growing number of Australian local governments have reaffirmed their longstanding climate leadership by declaring a climate emergency. Indeed, since 2016, when Melbourne's Darebin council became the world's first local government to declare a climate emergency, close to 100 local governments – or a little under one fifth of all Australian local governments – have taken the extraordinary step and made a similar declaration. But although these local government climate emergency declarations have received widespread government and media scrutiny, the precise nature and obligations of climate emergency declarations for local government remain unclear. Indeed, there is currently little analysis and understanding of what obligations local governments incur from declaring a climate emergency, whether those that have made such a declaration have fulfilled their obligations, and whether climate emergency declarations exceed the remit of existing local government environmental and climate roles and policies. This practice insight article seeks to answer these questions in both theory and practice. It finds that, at present, much of the talk about climate emergency by local government may merely be symbolic and broadly aligned with their existing local environmental and climate roles and policies.
The article summarizes the world experience of holding local elections and provides requirements for candidates and participants in the election process. The relations that are formed between public authorities and territorial communities are investigated. The peculiarities of the representative bodies formation of local self-government in a number of developed democracies are given. The foreign practice of holding local elections is compared and the basic principles and functions of local elections are revealed. Recommendations on borrowing foreign experience in the formation of local government in Ukraine are given. The article analyzes Ukrainian legislation on local elections and local self-government staffing.
This paper examines emerging citizen and local government relations in a village in the Junglemahal region of the state of West Bengal, once a major bastion of the Maoist insurgency in India. Since 2014, Junglemahal has not experienced a single Maoist-related incident. This has been widely attributed to the West Bengal government's "model" handling of the insurgency, which rests on the rapid mobilization of public services through the non-elected arms of local governments, bypassing elected officials. How have Junglemahal's residents experienced this particular form of post-conflict governance? Drawing on the culture-centered approach that ethnographically observes the processes of identifying development problems and developing community-grounded solutions to these problems, our findings indicate that the hyper-developmental state was paradoxically experienced by our respondents as a very distant entity. A recurrent theme in our interviews is the absence of a locally embedded party leadership that could be approached regarding issues of distributive justice. We argue that this desire for party mediation in public service delivery is an expression of a powerful social norm that has survived the conflict and ought to be integrated into post-conflict governance structures if the current peace is to endure. (Crit Asian Stud/GIGA)