Education, Health and Housing in Ogoni Community: Does Government or Oil Firms Intervention Matter?

This paper examines the impact of interventions of government and Oil companies on the social wellbeing (education, health and housing) of Ogoni community in Niger Delta Region of Nigeria. Measurement of such impacts is an essential requirement for policy formulation and strategic planning. Primary data used in this study were collected through a survey of 400 households using a multistage sampling technique. The results reveal that government interventions in provision/renovation of school building and provision of scholarship have positive effect on school completion in the community. Making basic education free is a good policy; but if the households would need their children to be involved in income generation, such policy may fail. Thus, empowering the household heads and other working-class adult members of the household to raise enough income for the household would help the children become available to benefit from free education policy or even household-funded education

Households’ Perception of Factors Influencing Agricultural Productivity in Ogoni Community: An Ordinal Logit Approach

Agriculture is the principal means of livelihood in Ogoniland of Niger Delta region of Nigeria. Ascertaining the determinants of agricultural productivity in the community is therefore important in meeting food security and income needs. This study uses survey data of 400 households in Ogoni community. The data was collected using a multistage sampling method. An ordinal logit regression model was estimated. Descriptive analyses indicate that 75.8% of the surveyed households were involved in agricultural production and that only 37.1% of the households involved in agriculture had lost their agricultural produce due to oil spoilage in the last two years. The ordinal logit regression model identifies government intervention towards cleaning of polluted land and water, land degradation, air pollution and household income as significant determinants of agricultural productivity in the community. However, land degradation and air pollution are negatively associated with agricultural productivity while government intervention towards cleaning of polluted land and water and household income are positively related to agricultural productivity in Ogoni community. On the other hand, the result indicates that corporate social responsibility of oil firms towards cleaning of polluted land and water), oil spill and education attainment of household head are not among the significant determinants of agricultural productivity in Ogoni community

Interfacing ICT with Entrepreneurship Culture in a Developing Country in Contest with Cyber-Crimes: Gains and Pains

This paper is a cross-sectional analysis, critique and exposé of the impacts and the implications of the interfacing of ICT with entrepreneurship ventures in contest with cyber-crimes in a developing economy such as Nigeria. An entrepreneur is simply an individual who is willing to risk investing time and money in a business activity that has the potential to make a profit or incur loss. More specifically, the enterprising individual is someone who organizes production, bringing together the factors of production viz; land, labor, and capital to make goods and services. He makes business decisions, figuring out what goods to produce and how to produce them even in the face of the emerging cyber-crimes, knowing that there is no guarantee that business decisions will not be sabotaged. Again he innovates, introducing new products & technologies by the applications of information and communication technology (ICT) and related methods as new ways of organizing business. Entrepreneurs come from all types of background. The types of business they create come in all shapes and sizes. They range from, craft shops, wielding, foundries, rubber processing and vulcanizing, food eg “okpapreneur”, ogiri-preneur, akpupreneur, palm-wine-preneur, compu-preneur etc. They are active in all classification of business activity, and are the foundation of the small business sector of our country’s economy. Entrepreneurs are the proprietors of the apprenticeship system that provides primary vehicle for training the labor for small business. The apprenticeship system is one in which an individual serves a proprietor or master for a given period of time in order to learn a trade or craft. It generates a large multiplier effect in employment creation. Generally, there is also a reflection of gross under development of entrepreneurial culture in our academic curricula. Sorrowfully enough, the bane of our educational system curricula, inter alia, is that it is designed towards DEPENDABILITY instead of CREATIVITY to our students (FRCN Oral, 2015). Thus, the present curricula in use in our tertiary institutions should be reorganized and improved upon to serve as an engine of innovation, imagination and vision. The new curricula envisaged should expose students to courses which create opportunities for skill acquisition and entrepreneurship promotion, and broaden access to information and communication technology which encompass all computer-based systems such as tele-conferencing, video-conferencing and the Internet with its world wide web (www).The present picture of our educational system shows defects in national priorities due to lack of proper planning. Data from the National Universities commission show that, the Polytechnic and Colleges of Education enrolled relatively less number of students than the Universities. As a result, graduate output of Universities out-numbers that of other tertiary institutions designed to produce the middle level manpower. This clearly demonstrates that more managerial and executive personnel are produced than what is produced at the middle level, which otherwise should be more. Furthermore, Olaiya (1998) evaluated this problem of imbalance and posited that it has been reflecting in the poor performance of the economy. According to Ihekoronye (2000), the synthesis of this view and the lesson to be learnt from it is that a well planned manpower programme for the country ought to produce more at the middle level, bearing in mind that in an economy, where there are more managers and administrators than those producing and maintaining, there are resultant economic crisis, under-production, under-employment of high-level manpower, scarcity of necessary commodities and lack of appropriate technology development. Keywords: Cyber-crimes, entrepreneurs, compupreneur, firewalls, computer forensics, ICT, “okpapreneur”, palm-wine-preneur

Households’ Perception of Factors Influencing Agricultural Productivity in Ogoni Community: An Ordinal Logit Approach

Agriculture is the principal means of livelihood in Ogoniland of Niger Delta region of Nigeria. Ascertaining the determinants of agricultural productivity in the community is therefore important in meeting food security and income needs. This study uses survey data of 400 households in Ogoni community. The data was collected using a multistage sampling method. An ordinal logit regression model was estimated. Descriptive analyses indicate that 75.8% of the surveyed households were involved in agricultural production and that only 37.1% of the households involved in agriculture had lost their agricultural produce due to oil spoilage in the last two years. The ordinal logit regression model identifies government intervention towards cleaning of polluted land and water, land degradation, air pollution and household income as significant determinants of agricultural productivity in the community. However, land degradation and air pollution are negatively associated with agricultural productivity while government intervention towards cleaning of polluted land and water and household income are positively related to agricultural productivity in Ogoni community. On the other hand, the result indicates that corporate social responsibility of oil firms towards cleaning of polluted land and water), oil spill and education attainment of household head are not among the significant determinants of agricultural productivity in Ogoni community

Dynamics of IgG antibody response against Plasmodium antigens among Nigerian infants and young children

BackgroundPlasmodium falciparum malaria is a leading cause of child mortality in Nigeria. Neonates are born with maternal antibodies from placental transfer which may protect against malaria infection in the first months of life. The IgG dynamics of the transition from passively transferred antimalarial antibodies to actively acquired IgG from natural exposure have not been well elucidated.MethodsBlood samples collected during a 2018 Nigeria nationwide HIV/AIDS household survey were available for 9,443 children under 5 years of age, with a subset of infants under 2 months of age having maternal samples available (n=41). Samples were assayed for the P. falciparum HRP2 antigen and anti-malarial IgG antibodies. LOESS regression examined the dynamics in IgG response in the first 5 years of life. Correlation with maternal IgG levels was assessed for mother/child pairs.ResultsConsistent decreases were observed in median IgG levels against all Plasmodium spp. antigen targets for the first months of life. At a population level, P. falciparum apical membrane antigen-1 (AMA1) and merozoite surface protein-1 19kD (PfMSP1) IgG decreased during the first 12 months of life before reaching a nadir, whereas IgGs to other targets only declined for the first 4 months of life. Seropositivity showed a similar decline with the lowest seropositivity against AMA1 and PfMSP1 at 10-12 months, though remaining above 50% during the first 2 years of life in higher transmission areas. No protective association was observed between IgG positivity and P. falciparum infection in infants. Maternal antibody levels showed a strong positive correlation with infant antibody levels for all P. falciparum antigens from birth to 2 months of age, but this correlation was lost by 6 months of age.DiscussionMaternally transferred anti-malarial IgG antibodies rapidly decline during the first 6 months of life, with variations among specific antigens and malaria transmission intensity. From 3-23 months of age, there was a wide range in IgG levels for the blood-stage antigens indicating high individual variation in antibody production as children are infected with malaria. Non-falciparum species-specific antigens showed similar patterns in waning immunity and correlation with paired mother’s IgG levels compared to P. falciparum antigens

Effect of surgical experience and spine subspecialty on the reliability of the {AO} Spine Upper Cervical Injury Classification System

OBJECTIVE The objective of this paper was to determine the interobserver reliability and intraobserver reproducibility of the AO Spine Upper Cervical Injury Classification System based on surgeon experience (< 5 years, 5–10 years, 10–20 years, and > 20 years) and surgical subspecialty (orthopedic spine surgery, neurosurgery, and "other" surgery). METHODS A total of 11,601 assessments of upper cervical spine injuries were evaluated based on the AO Spine Upper Cervical Injury Classification System. Reliability and reproducibility scores were obtained twice, with a 3-week time interval. Descriptive statistics were utilized to examine the percentage of accurately classified injuries, and Pearson’s chi-square or Fisher’s exact test was used to screen for potentially relevant differences between study participants. Kappa coefficients (κ) determined the interobserver reliability and intraobserver reproducibility. RESULTS The intraobserver reproducibility was substantial for surgeon experience level (< 5 years: 0.74 vs 5–10 years: 0.69 vs 10–20 years: 0.69 vs > 20 years: 0.70) and surgical subspecialty (orthopedic spine: 0.71 vs neurosurgery: 0.69 vs other: 0.68). Furthermore, the interobserver reliability was substantial for all surgical experience groups on assessment 1 (< 5 years: 0.67 vs 5–10 years: 0.62 vs 10–20 years: 0.61 vs > 20 years: 0.62), and only surgeons with > 20 years of experience did not have substantial reliability on assessment 2 (< 5 years: 0.62 vs 5–10 years: 0.61 vs 10–20 years: 0.61 vs > 20 years: 0.59). Orthopedic spine surgeons and neurosurgeons had substantial intraobserver reproducibility on both assessment 1 (0.64 vs 0.63) and assessment 2 (0.62 vs 0.63), while other surgeons had moderate reliability on assessment 1 (0.43) and fair reliability on assessment 2 (0.36). CONCLUSIONS The international reliability and reproducibility scores for the AO Spine Upper Cervical Injury Classification System demonstrated substantial intraobserver reproducibility and interobserver reliability regardless of surgical experience and spine subspecialty. These results support the global application of this classification system

Contribution of PEPFAR-Supported HIV and TB Molecular Diagnostic Networks to COVID-19 Testing Preparedness in 16 Countries.

The US President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) supports molecular HIV and tuberculosis diagnostic networks and information management systems in low- and middle-income countries. We describe how national programs leveraged these PEPFAR-supported laboratory resources for SARS-CoV-2 testing during the COVID-19 pandemic. We sent a spreadsheet template consisting of 46 indicators for assessing the use of PEPFAR-supported diagnostic networks for COVID-19 pandemic response activities during April 1, 2020, to March 31, 2021, to 27 PEPFAR-supported countries or regions. A total of 109 PEPFAR-supported centralized HIV viral load and early infant diagnosis laboratories and 138 decentralized HIV and TB sites reported performing SARS-CoV-2 testing in 16 countries. Together, these sites contributed to >3.4 million SARS-CoV-2 tests during the 1-year period. Our findings illustrate that PEPFAR-supported diagnostic networks provided a wide range of resources to respond to emergency COVID-19 diagnostic testing in 16 low- and middle-income countries

MasakhaNEWS:News Topic Classification for African languages

African languages are severely under-represented in NLP research due to lack of datasets covering several NLP tasks. While there are individual language specific datasets that are being expanded to different tasks, only a handful of NLP tasks (e.g. named entity recognition and machine translation) have standardized benchmark datasets covering several geographical and typologically-diverse African languages. In this paper, we develop MasakhaNEWS -- a new benchmark dataset for news topic classification covering 16 languages widely spoken in Africa. We provide an evaluation of baseline models by training classical machine learning models and fine-tuning several language models. Furthermore, we explore several alternatives to full fine-tuning of language models that are better suited for zero-shot and few-shot learning such as cross-lingual parameter-efficient fine-tuning (like MAD-X), pattern exploiting training (PET), prompting language models (like ChatGPT), and prompt-free sentence transformer fine-tuning (SetFit and Cohere Embedding API). Our evaluation in zero-shot setting shows the potential of prompting ChatGPT for news topic classification in low-resource African languages, achieving an average performance of 70 F1 points without leveraging additional supervision like MAD-X. In few-shot setting, we show that with as little as 10 examples per label, we achieved more than 90\% (i.e. 86.0 F1 points) of the performance of full supervised training (92.6 F1 points) leveraging the PET approach

Emergence and spread of two SARS-CoV-2 variants of interest in Nigeria.

Identifying the dissemination patterns and impacts of a virus of economic or health importance during a pandemic is crucial, as it informs the public on policies for containment in order to reduce the spread of the virus. In this study, we integrated genomic and travel data to investigate the emergence and spread of the SARS-CoV-2 B.1.1.318 and B.1.525 (Eta) variants of interest in Nigeria and the wider Africa region. By integrating travel data and phylogeographic reconstructions, we find that these two variants that arose during the second wave in Nigeria emerged from within Africa, with the B.1.525 from Nigeria, and then spread to other parts of the world. Data from this study show how regional connectivity of Nigeria drove the spread of these variants of interest to surrounding countries and those connected by air-traffic. Our findings demonstrate the power of genomic analysis when combined with mobility and epidemiological data to identify the drivers of transmission, as bidirectional transmission within and between African nations are grossly underestimated as seen in our import risk index estimates

The evolving SARS-CoV-2 epidemic in Africa: Insights from rapidly expanding genomic surveillance.

Investment in severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) sequencing in Africa over the past year has led to a major increase in the number of sequences that have been generated and used to track the pandemic on the continent, a number that now exceeds 100,000 genomes. Our results show an increase in the number of African countries that are able to sequence domestically and highlight that local sequencing enables faster turnaround times and more-regular routine surveillance. Despite limitations of low testing proportions, findings from this genomic surveillance study underscore the heterogeneous nature of the pandemic and illuminate the distinct dispersal dynamics of variants of concern-particularly Alpha, Beta, Delta, and Omicron-on the continent. Sustained investment for diagnostics and genomic surveillance in Africa is needed as the virus continues to evolve while the continent faces many emerging and reemerging infectious disease threats. These investments are crucial for pandemic preparedness and response and will serve the health of the continent well into the 21st century