Worldwide Contrast in Application of Bio-Fertilizers for Sustainable Agriculture: Lessons for Sub-Saharan Africa

The use of bio-fertilizers in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is low compared to selected developed and Asian countries. The later have perceived the products as useful and have invested in use of bio-fertilizers in their agricultural systems. Effective regulations in developed and selected Asian countries have enhanced the availability of high quality products. Conversely, lack of awareness, infrastructure, skill and absence of a supportive regulatory framework in SSA has negatively impacted the use of bio-fertilizers. This review aims at pointing out what SSA could learn from selected developed and Asian countries to improve the availability and adoption of high quality bio-fertilizers. The benefits in terms of biological nitrogen fixation, nutrient uptake, yield increases, cost saving, and utilization constraints are discussed to create awareness of stakeholders interested in the agricultural application of the technology in SSA. Keywords: bio-fertilizer, availability, adoption, profitability, sub-Saharan Afric

Establishing the quality management baseline in the use of computed tomography machines in Kenya

The objective of this study was to assess the level of compliance to quality assurance and image quality standards in computed tomography facilities in Kenyan hospitals. A quality assurance inspection and physical image quality assessment in eighteen representative computed tomography facilities were completed. A quantitative method was developed and used to score the results obtained from the physical image quality measurements using the American Association of Physicists in Medicine (AAPM) water phantom. Inspection was done in order to establish the level of compliance with internationally recognized standards such as those stipulated in the European Guidelines Quality Criteria for Computed Tomography and the International Basic Safety Standards for Protection against Ionizing Radiation. The overall findings placed the national quality management performance at 50± 3%, while image quality and quality assurance performance were 61 ± 3% and 37 ± 3%, respectively. The quality assurance assessment benchmarked the country’s level of quality management system compliance in diagnostic radiology. During accreditation appraisal, the scrutiny of scores from each stage in the medical imaging chain per facility will encourage continual implementation of the quality improvement process

ANTI-BACTERIAL ACTIVITIES AND PHYTOCHEMICAL SCREENING OF EXTRACTS OF DIFFERENT PARTS OF THALICTRUM RHYNCHOCARPUM

Parts of the plant Thalictrum rhyncocarpum are used in herbal medicine in Kenya to treat various infections. The aim of this study was to evaluate in-vitro anti-bacteria activities and phytochemical profiles of solvent extracts of the leaves, stem bark and root of Thalictrum rhyncocarpum against Bacillus subtilis-6633, Staphylococcus aures-SG 511, Escherichia coli SG 458, Pseudomonus aeruginosa-K799/61 and Mycobacterium vaccae-10670. Anti-bacterial activity tests were carried out using disc diffusion assay and tube dilution technique, and phytochemical screening was carried out through Thin Layer Chromatography. The crude extracts showed antibacterial effects on M. vaccae, P. aeruginosa and B. subtilis. M. vaccae was most sensitive, particularly to the methanol root extract. Phytochemical screening of the extracts suggested the presence of glycosides and alkaloids in the stem bark and root extracts, and flavonoids and triterpenes in the leaf extracts. The study showed interesting levels of activities of solvent extracts of different parts of T. rhyncocarpum against some of the bacteria tested (M. vaccae, P. aeruginosa and B. subtilis). The results provide some scientific rationale for the traditional use of the plant in Kenya to treat different microbial infections

Track D Social Science, Human Rights and Political Science

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/138414/1/jia218442.pd

AfriMTE and AfriCOMET : Empowering COMET to Embrace Under-resourced African Languages

Despite the progress we have recorded in scaling multilingual machine translation (MT) models and evaluation data to several under-resourced African languages, it is difficult to measure accurately the progress we have made on these languages because evaluation is often performed on n-gram matching metrics like BLEU that often have worse correlation with human judgments. Embedding-based metrics such as COMET correlate better; however, lack of evaluation data with human ratings for under-resourced languages, complexity of annotation guidelines like Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM), and limited language coverage of multilingual encoders have hampered their applicability to African languages. In this paper, we address these challenges by creating high-quality human evaluation data with a simplified MQM guideline for error-span annotation and direct assessment (DA) scoring for 13 typologically diverse African languages. Furthermore, we develop AfriCOMET, a COMET evaluation metric for African languages by leveraging DA training data from high-resource languages and African-centric multilingual encoder (AfroXLM-Roberta) to create the state-of-the-art evaluation metric for African languages MT with respect to Spearman-rank correlation with human judgments (+0.406)

Characterization of a composite with enhanced attraction to savannah tsetse flies from constituents or analogues of tsetse refractory waterbuck (Kobus defassa) body odor.

Savannah tsetse flies avoid flying toward tsetse fly-refractory waterbuck (Kobus defassa) mediated by a repellent blend of volatile compounds in their body odor comprised of δ-octalactone, geranyl acetone, phenols (guaiacol and carvacrol), and homologues of carboxylic acids (C5-C10) and 2-alkanones (C8-C13). However, although the blends of carboxylic acids and that of 2-alkanones contributed incrementally to the repellency of the waterbuck odor to savannah tsetse flies, some waterbuck constituents (particularly, nonanoic acid and 2-nonanone) showed significant attractive properties. In another study, increasing the ring size of δ-octalactone from six to seven membered ring changed the activity of the resulting molecule (ε-nonalactone) on the savannah tsetse flies from repellency to attraction. In the present study, we first compared the effect of blending ε-nonalactone, nonanoic acid and 2-nonanone in 1:1 binary and 1:1:1 ternary combination on responses of Glossina pallidipes and Glossina morsitans morsitans tsetse flies in a two-choice wind tunnel. The compounds showed clear synergistic effects in the blends, with the ternary blend demonstrating higher attraction than the binary blends and individual compounds. Our follow up laboratory comparisons of tsetse fly responses to ternary combinations with different relative proportions of the three components showed that the blend in 1:3:2 proportion was most attractive relative to fermented cow urine (FCU) to both tsetse species. In our field experiments at Shimba Hills game reserve in Kenya, where G. pallidipes are dominant, the pattern of tsetse catches we obtained with different proportions of the three compounds were similar to those we observed in the laboratory. Interestingly, the three-component blend in 1:3:2 proportion when released at optimized rate of 13.71mg/h was 235% more attractive to G. pallidipes than a combination of POCA (3-n-Propylphenol, 1-Octen-3-ol, 4-Cresol, and Acetone) and fermented cattle urine (FCU). This constitutes a novel finding with potential for downstream deployment in bait technologies for more effective control of G. pallidipes, G. m. morsitans, and perhaps other savannah tsetse fly species, in 'pull' and 'pull-push' tactics