The number of forcibly displaced people due to conflict, violence, etc. has surpassed 100 million worldwide, and the number of refugees among them has reached 32.5 million. Under such circumstances, the importance of enabling refugees to live independent lives, and developing refugee human resources who can contribute to refugee-hosting countries and societies, are emphasized.

This paper aims to clarify the motivations of private companies to hire refugees, including asylum seekers, in Japan and the processes that realize the workforce integration of refugees from the perspective of private companies.

We implemented semi-structured interviews with 21 people of 15 companies that hire, have hired, or have intention to hire refugees in Japan. A Grounded Theory Approach (GTA) was used for data analysis. In addition, we conducted supplementary interviews with 4 refugee supporting organizatitons in Japan to understand the overall picture and challenges of refugee employment in Japan.

Japanese private companies “consider hiring foreign workers” when there is necessity, such as business expansion and/or transactions overseas, internationalization within the company, or responsing to the shortage of human resources. And/or there “is a strong commitment to refugee issues” from management. Through contacts with refugee supporting organizations, some of these Japanese private companies led to “conducting trial and error for accepting refugee workers” or “preparing the necessary environment for hiring refugee workers.”

In “conducting trial and error for accepting refugee workers,” if there are multiple trial and error menus for accepting refugee workers, some comapnies arrive at the stage of “preparing the necessary environment for hiring refugee workers.” If the stance of the Japanese private companies that accept refugee workers is positive and there are various devices and/or systems in place to accept them, some result in creating “a refugee-friendly working environment.”

To increase more Japanese companies that hire refugee workers, the role of refugee supporting organizations, approaching group leaders or section heads of the companies cosidering hiring foreign workers and widely introducing various processes and cases of acceptance of refugee workers are indispensable.

Having an appropriate understanding between education and obesity/overweight is essential in selecting relevant education-based policies on public health. Existing studies in Kenya only identify the correlation between education level and overweight/obesity, and the nature of the causality is still unclear. This study examines the effect of an additional year at school on the risk of being obese for Kenyan women. I used data from Kenya Demographic and Health Survey (KDHS) 2008-09 and 2014. The probability of being underweight, overweight, and obese was analyzed by 2SLS using the 1985 Education Reform as an Instrumental Variable to overcome the endogenous problem of education. Indeed, education affects reducing underweight women. However, an additional year of schooling significantly increases women's risk of being obese. Overall, we suppose that higher education leads to an increase in the risk of becoming overweight and obese by increasing purchasing power and by changing the living environment.

The Nepal government has been seeking commercialization of agriculture to improve the problems such as poverty, food insecurity, and migration of young people to foreign countries. However, commercialization has been criticized for benefitting only large landowners, often causing more harm than good to smallholder farmers. In this study, we focused on hybrid seeds as a core technology of commercialized agriculture. The purpose of this study was to document the perceptions of smallholders in Nepal regarding hybrid seeds. This study revealed a change in smallholder cultivation styles. They increased synthesized fertilizers and pesticides after adopting hybrid seeds, which resulted in a shift from cost-free to costly farming. This shift is unfavorable for smallholders especially illiterate farmers because hybrid seeds require a highly knowledge-intensive process. This study also revealed the smallholders' low motivations for continuing agriculture, and risk of extinction of smallholders in rural Nepal.