Thoughts on governance and future orientation of Agricultural Research in Ethiopia

Agriculture needs to be more efficient and productive to provide more food and feed with less environmental damage to which agricultural research has a lot to offer by designing a broader research agenda. This calls for overhauling the research system towards creating a seamless coordination mechanism, assigning adequate work force, and improving physical and financial capacities. As a federated country and for its diverse agro-ecologies and socio-economic settings, decentralized research system is feasible option for Ethiopia. This, however, needs a strong coordination mechanism, lest the research institutions tend to fragment into a number of isolated entities. To this end, the National Agricultural Research Council needs to re-define NARS entities, differentiate their roles, and ensure effective coordination through creating avant-garde Centers of Excellences. The country’s future research needs to embrace modern biosciences, and alongside of technology adaptation it should generate technologies and ensure technology security, and subsequently technology export. In terms of funding, research in its own right should receive a core budgetary allocation from the federal parliamentary appropriation while competitive funding scheme is also important. A well-planned staff development and succession plan is essential to strengthen the research work force. Besides, re-hiring out-gone researchers, and seconding researchers to veteran scientists at national and international research excellence centers would be helpful. Staff motivation and commitment is also vital. Staff recruitment modality needs to change as well. All in all, the country’s agricultural research system needs to be reinforced to help sustaining productivity, food security, competitiveness and profitability of the agricultural sector

Assessing Inclusive Education Implementation Practice, Diffusion and Policy Issues in Benchi Maji Zone, South West Ethiopia

The Purpose of this study is to assess the Inclusive Education Practice, diffusion and policy Implementation status in Mizan - Aman, Biftu and Shebenchi high schools in Benchi Maji zone, south Nations, Nationalities and Peoples Region. The study had used a mixed methods research design to address its objectives to both qualitative and quantitative data were collected and analyzed, partnerships with teachers and students. The Participants of this study were 73 teachers and 167students from all sites. The study was conducted using quantitative and qualitative methods employing questionnaire, interview and observation to collect data. The data were analyzed by using descriptive and inferential statistics method. T-test and one way ANOVA were employed in among variables. The result revealed that Inclusive education practice, diffusion and policy issue implemented in medium level. T-test result revealed that there is no statistical significance difference in both male and female students in Inclusive Education diffusion and policy issue, but there is statistical significance difference in Inclusive Education practice. Similarly, in between both male and female teachers there is no statistical significance difference in Inclusive Education diffusion, practice and policy issues. The one way ANOVA result shows that there is no statistical significance difference in teachers service year, teaching load and class size in Inclusive education practice, diffusion and policy issue. Keywords: Inclusive Education, practice, diffusion, policy issue, Implementatio

Evaluation of land use/land cover changes of Bantneka Watershed, Ethiopia

This study was carried out to examine the trend of land use and land cover changes of Bantenka watershed, Ethiopia through time. It was conducted using satellite image of Landsat5 TM 1986, Landsat7 ETM+ 2000 and Spot 2006. In addition, field observations and focus group discussions were conducted. ERDAS Imagine 9.1 and ArcGIS 9.3 software for satellite image processing, and global positioning system as well as topographical maps of scale 1:50,000 for ground verification were used. The result of the study revealed that annual cereal crop, mixed and woodland showed a negative rate of change. However, perennial crop land and settlement land were increased by 5.83 and 1.41 ha/year respectively from 1986-2006. It implies that perennial crop land and settlement land were the major driving forces for the change of watershed biodiversity and other land resources. Key words: Land use and land cover change, watershe

Forms and Norms Matters Manufacturing Firms Corporate Social Responsibility /CSR/ Practices in East Gojjam Zone, Ethiopia

Ethiopia is one of the developing countries where the philosophy of corporate social responsibility is not well developed and also the governance system takes the form of mere control and decision making rather than encouraging development and implementation of a well-developed ethical code of conduct in the four spectrums. The main purpose of the study is focuses on to assessing forms and norms of manufacturing firm CSR practice in East Gojjam Zone. The study has realized in 13 higher manufacturing firms and 253 respondent stakeholders from the surrounding have been taken through descriptive study design. Primarily Questionnaire, interview, observation have used. Data have been analyzed by descriptive statistical tools by apply SPSS package. The results had shown us that there are no accepted forms and norms in external environment, Social and economy /context on the way organizations CSR operations in east Gojjam zone. Hence, the sympathy to the forms and norms of social responsibility in our case is still in its infant stage. The dilemma between the global standards and the local practices towards implementing CSR haven’t been balanced. Generally, the study recommends that Prospectors & Developers Association of Canada (2009) management system structure and requirements e-toolkit must be applied. Keywords: CSR, UN, Practices and East Gojjam Zones DOI: 10.7176/EJBM/12-10-02 Publication date: April 30th 202

Population Growth and Land Resources Degradation in Bantneka Watershed, Southern Ethiopia

The study was conducted to examine the effects of population growth on land resources degradation in Bantaneka watershed, Southern Ethiopia. For the study, both secondary and primary data were used. The secondary data were collected from population data of 1984, 1994, 2004, 2007 and 2010. While, the primary data were collected through survey questionnaire, semi structured interview, field observations and focus group discussions. Questionnaire survey was conducted on 60 samples of farming households which were selected from upper, middle and lower part of the watershed. The study result revealed that both population number and density was increased from 1984-2010, and the average landholding size per households has decreased from 0.68ha in 1994 to 0.48ha in 2007. Due to high population growth, agricultural practices have expanded into upland and marginal areas, and clearing of indigenous trees has become prevalent. Thus, the existing population growth puts pressure for land resources degradation in the study watershed. Keywords: population growth, degradation, watershed

Analysis of rainfall and temperature data to determine climate change in Dilla Zuria District, Southern Ethiopia

The objective this study was to determine climate change in Dilla Zuria District, Southern Ethiopia using rainfall and temperature data. To do so, rain fall data from 1955-2010 and temperature data from 1997-2010 was employed. Focus group discussions and key informant interview were also conducted. The collected data was analyzed using SPSS v.16 soft ware. The result showed that there was a reduction of rain fall with the variability on the onset and off set of rainy seasons and increase of temperature. The conversion of large indigenous trees is responsible for the observed changes in rainfall and temperature. Key words: Temperature, rainfall, variability, climate chang

Seasonality and determinants of child growth velocity and growth deficit in rural southwest Ethiopia

Background: Ethiopia faces cyclic food insecurity that alternates between pre- and post-harvest seasons. Whether seasonal variation in access to food is associated with child growth has not been assessed empirically. Understanding seasonality of child growth velocity and growth deficit helps to improve efforts to track population interventions against malnutrition. The aim of this study was assess child growth velocity, growth deficit, and their determinants in rural southwest Ethiopia. Method: Data were obtained from four rounds of a longitudinal household survey conducted in ten districts in Oromiya Region and Southern Nations, Nationality and Peoples Region of Ethiopia, in which 1200 households were selected using multi-stage cluster sampling. Households with a child under 5 years were included in the present analyses (round 1 n = 579, round 2 n = 674, round 3 n = 674 and round 4 n = 680). The hierarchical nature of the data was taken into account during the statistical analyses by fitting a linear mixed effects model. A restricted maximum likelihood estimation method was employed in the analyses. Result: Compared to the post-harvest season, a higher length and weight velocity were observed in pre-harvest season with an average difference of 6.4 cm/year and 0.6 kg/year compared to the post-harvest season. The mean height of children in post-harvest seasons was 5.7 cm below the WHO median reference height. The mean height of children increased an additional 3.3 cm [95% CI (2.94, 3.73)] per year in pre-harvest season compared to the post-harvest season. Similarly, the mean weight of children increased 1.0 kg [95% CI (0.91, 1.11)] per year more in the pre-harvest season compared to the post-harvest season. Children who had a low dietary diversity and were born during the lean season in both seasons had a higher linear growth deficit. Being member of a highly food insecure household was negatively associated with higher weight gain. Having experienced no illness during the previous 2 weeks was positively associated with linear growth and weight gain. Conclusion: Child growth velocities and child growth deficits were higher in the pre-harvest season and post-harvest season respectively. Low dietary diversity and being part of a highly food insecure household were significantly risk factors for decreased linear growth and weight gain respectively

Genetic Diversity Study of Brachiaria brizantha (A.Rich) Stapf Collected from Ethiopia Using Inter- Simple Sequence Repeat (ISSR) Markers

Brachiaria brizantha is a grass that instigate the economical growth in livestock sectors. However, it is orphan forage species where genetic degradation due to poor rangeland management practices, particularly overgrazing  combine with climate changes highly affect its contribution in Ethiopia.  Research centers have been confused to re-introduce the germplasm.  It is because of lack of species profile documentation.  Genomic DNA was extracted from leaf by using a modified CTAB method. A total of 80 bands were amplified by the six ISSR primers. Percentage of polymorphic loci (PPL), gene diversity (h) and Shannon information’s index (I) were 96.25%, 0.366 and 0.539, respectively among population. Analysis of molecular variance indicated the presence of higher proportion of variation within population (64.66%) than among  populations (35.34 %). Cluster analysis using the un-weighted paired group method with arithmetic average (UPGMA) at Jaccard’s similarity coefficient of around 0.38 clustered the accessions into three major (I, II and III) clusters in their respective origin of collection.  Principal Component Analysis (PCO) showed accessions in populations formed their own distinct and clear cluster. Thus ISSR markers detected a range of genetic diversity in Brachiaria brizantha germplasm collections from Ethiopia. Keywords: Brachiaria brizantha, Genetic diversity, ISSR marker

Development of a decision support system for decision-based part/fixture assignment and fixture flow control.

Doctoral Degree. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban.An intense competition in a dynamic situation has increased the requirements that must be considered in the current manufacturing systems. Among those factors, fixtures are one of the major problematic components. The cost of fixture design and manufacture contributes to 10-20% of production costs. Manufacturing firms usually use traditional methods for part/fixture assignment works. These methods are highly resource consuming and cumbersome to enumerate the available fixtures and stabilise the number of fixtures required in a system. The aim of this study was to research and develop a Decision Support System (DSS), which was useful to perform a decision-based part/fixture assignment and fixture flow control during planned production periods. The DSS was designed to assist its users to reuse/adapt the retrieved fixtures or manufacture new fixtures depending upon the state of the retrieved fixtures and the similarities between the current and retrieved cases. This DSS combined Case-Based Reasoning (CBR), fuzzy set theory, the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Discrete-Event Simulation (DES) techniques. The Artificial Intelligence (AI) component of the DSS immensely used a fuzzy CBR system combined with the fuzzy AHP and guiding rules from general domain knowledge. The fuzzy CBR was used to represent the uncertain and imprecise values of case attributes. The fuzzy AHP was applied to elicit domain knowledge from experts to prioritise case attributes. New part orders and training samples were represented as new and prior cases respectively using an Object-Oriented (OO) method for case retrieval and decision proposal. Popular fuzzy ranking and similarity measuring approaches were utilised in the case retrieval process. A DES model was implemented to analyse the performances of the proposed solutions by the fuzzy CBR subsystem. Three scenarios were generated by this subsystem as solution alternatives that were the proposed numbers of fixtures. The performances of these scenarios were evaluated using the DES model and the best alternative was identified. The novelty of this study employed the combination of fuzzy CBR and DES methods since such kinds of combinations have not been addressed yet. A numerical example was illustrated to present the soundness of the proposed methodological approach.Please refer to the PDF for author's keywords

The Essentials of Conservation Agriculture for Soil Quality, Crop and Water Productivity in Ethiopian Agriculture: A Review

In fact food security can be increased through improved land use and land management practices. In Ethiopia much of the increase in crop production in the past decade has been due to increases in area of cultivated.  To what extent expansion can continue remains a question, therefore obtaining higher yield rates is the challenge of Ethiopia’s agricultural system. Conservation agriculture (mulching); which here refers to minimizing soil disturbance through no-till practice, application of organic mulch cover, and cropping in time; has the potential to improve soil quality, water, and crop productivity. The objectives of this critical review is to collect available information in similar production environments, indicators on the essential of CA contributions to soil quality, crop and water productivity both in dry and rainfall seasons of Ethiopian agriculture. Recently a study on the role of conservation agriculture indicates improve soil quality, crop yield and water productivity. In addition to this CA can be protect soil layer for erosions either wind or runoff, to optimize infiltration rate minimize runoff, to crate the path of soil it contributes micro nutrients move easily. So, reviewer concluded that conservation agriculture is potentially important to improve sustainable Ethiopian agricultural production and productivity. This agricultural practice (CA) should be able to adopt for irrigated and rain fed farms of Ethiopia. Keywords: Conservation Agriculture, soil quality, crop productivity, water productivity and Ethiopia DOI: 10.7176/JNSR/12-16-03 Publication date:August 31st 202