The New Alliance on Food Security and Nutrition: What are the Implications for Africa’s Youth?

The ‘New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition’ (hereafter the ‘New Alliance’) is a partnership which was established between selected African countries, G8 members, and the private sector to ‘work together to accelerate investments in agriculture to improve productivity, livelihoods and food security for smallholder farmers. Its pioneers anticipated that the initiative would simultaneously increase food production/availability and food accessibility/affordability through market conduits, thereby lifting millions of rural Africans out of poverty. To achieve this goal, its proponents put much faith in the private sector as the key driver of the initiative given the sector’s endowments in terms of financial resources, human capital, technological resources, intellectual property, market access, cutting-edge business practices, in-country networks and other expertise related to food security. Some critics of the New Alliance, however, challenged this initiative on grounds that the pursuit of the profit generation and developmental goals are incompatible and mutually exclusive in essence, and the combination of these two can’t and will never work for the benefit of the poor, as the latter will always be adversely incorporated into the former.ESRC-DFID Joint Poverty Alleviation Programme, Grant ES/J01754X/

Novel Optimization Approaches for Integrated Design and Operation of Smart Manufacturing and Energy Systems

This dissertation contributes novel theoretical results that enable the use of efficient optimization algorithms for the design of energy and manufacturing systems with high operational flexibility. Operational flexibility is a central theme of the smart grid and smart manufacturing paradigms because it enables systems to optimally adapt to highly dynamic and uncertain operating environments. Such environments are increasingly prevalent in the energy and manufacturing industries due to factors such as the increasing use of variable renewable energy resources (e.g., wind and solar) and the potential benefits of responding quickly to variations in product demands, real-time electricity markets, etc. For systems such as microgrids, combined heat and power plants, multiproduct chemical plants, and biorefineries, such flexibility has the potential to provide huge economic and environmental benefits. However, it also requires systems to make substantial changes in their operating conditions over very short-time scales, including discrete changes in their operating modes of process equipment (e.g., on/off) or the portfolio of products being produced. Designing systems with such operational flexibility requires consideration of the short-term operational details (e.g., minutes to hours) and future uncertainties that will affect system\u27s performance over its entire lifetime (e.g., decades). This gives rise to a complex optimization problem called integrated design and operation under uncertainty. This problem is complex mainly because the long-term design decisions of interest are tightly coupled with a very large number of short-term operational decisions that must be made over many operational periods and under significant uncertainty. Moreover, these operational decision are mixed-integer decisions, which are particularly challenging for optimization, because they are used to model both discrete and continuous changes in operations. Unfortunately, such problems cannot be solved both accurately and efficiently by standard mathematical programming approaches without major simplifications. At the same time, simplifications that are computationally tractable significantly reduce the level of operational detail that can be captured by the optimization model, which often result in system designs that are sub-optimal or even infeasible for real operations. An alternative approach, which we refer to as the simulation-based optimization (SO) approach, is to evaluate candidate system designs using a stochastic simulation of the system’s operations over all operational periods and in multiple uncertain scenarios. The design problem is then solved by optimizing the output of this simulation with respect to the design decisions. This approach is scalable to models with much more operational detail in terms of the number of operational periods and the number of uncertain scenarios considered, both of which are essential for representing operational flexibility. However, this approach results in highly complex and discontinuous optimization problems due to the discrete decisions that are made within the simulation to represent short-term operations. Hence, solving this formulation usually requires heuristic gradient-free optimization algorithms that are extremely inefficient for high-dimensional problems and offer no theoretical guarantee of finding an optimal design. To address these challenges, this dissertation presents novel theoretical results that enable the SO formulation to be solved much more efficiently using gradient-based local optimization algorithms. In contrast to the common practice of approximating the cost function as a finite sum of costs associated with discrete uncertain scenarios (i.e., sample-average approximation), we instead model the cost as the true expected value over all possible scenarios described by a continuous probability distribution. In this context, our key insight is that averaging over uncertain scenarios is a smoothing operation, and hence this expected cost can be a smooth function of the design decisions despite the fact that sample average approximations are discontinuous. When this is true, the SO formulation can be solved efficiently using gradient-based optimization methods. In Chapter 2, we develop this approach assuming that the operational decisions within the simulation are made with a logical control policy that is specified a priori. Specifically, we consider a type of controller called an energy management policy that is in common use in microgrid simulations. We then derive and rigorously prove two sets of sufficient conditions on the energy management policy under which the expected cost of the simulation is smooth. We demonstrate that these conditions are easily verifiable and often satisfied in practical applications. Finally, we implement different gradient-based algorithms, including a custom-made stochastic gradient descent algorithm, to solve the SO formulation for a representative example problem and show that this approach significantly outperforms derivative-free algorithms in both computational speed and solution quality. In Chapter 3, we extend this approach to address a much more general mathematical programming formulation of the integrated design and operation problem called multistage stochastic programming (MSP). We argue that this general MSP formulation can be accurately approximated by making all operational decisions using a parameterized mixed-integer decision rule, which reduces the MSP to an SO problem that can be solved efficiently as in Chapter 2. We then extend the smoothness conditions developed in Chapter 2. To develop this approach, we first propose a very general class of mixed-integer decision rules that is flexible enough to approximate near-optimal operational decisions for general MSPs, and then extend the sufficient conditions developed in Chapter 2 to rigorously establish smoothness of the resulting SO approximation. The resulting sufficient conditions are significantly more general than those in Chapter 2, and therefore apply to a much larger class of problems. We then show that these conditions are often satisfied in practice, and that they can always be made to hold by randomizing the decision rule. Finally, we implement different gradient-based algorithms to solve the SO approximation for a representative example problem and show that this approach significantly outperforms derivative-free algorithms in both computational speed and solution quality. Overall, the novel theoretical results developed in this dissertation are shown to enable efficient solution of significantly larger integrated design and operation problems than could be solved by existing approaches

Agricultural Commercialisation in Meru County, Kenya: What are the Policy Implications?

Contemporary processes of agrarian change tend to favour larger-scale, more consolidated farms over smallholders, while Kenya’s agricultural policy tends to promote export oriented commercial farming. These tensions, evident in different ways over time, raise important policy questions. What are the most advantageous forms of agricultural commercialisation? What scale and capital intensity in agricultural investment are appropriate? These questions in turn feed into the debates about alternative pathways of commercialisation and the role of different farming ‘models’. This study aimed to engage these debates. The study was carried out in Kenya’s Meru County and examined three agricultural farming models: outgrowers, medium-scale commercial farms and a plantation.ESRC-DFID Joint Poverty Alleviation Programme, Grant ES/J01754X/

Environmental Parameters Monitoring And Control System In Horticulture Greenhouse Using The Internet Of Things: Case Of IPRC Musanze

Efficient management of greenhouse farming is a challenge to ensure high yield production. This is a great challenge to farmers who do not have a reliable mechanism to ensure the optimum environmental conditions for their crops. Farmers are opting to look for solutions from technologies such as Machine to Machine and Internet of Things. This paper proposes a wireless sensor network architecture for real-time greenhouse environmental parameters monitoring to achieve technology- based farming at a low management cost. Uncontrolled temperature, humidity, light intensity and soil moisture content, are among the major parameters that contribute to the deterioration of plants in the green house. The system employs the temperature and Humidity sensor DHT11, a light sensor LDR and soil moisture sensor to detect the environment parameters inside the greenhouse. A low-cost Wi-Fi microchip, with built -in TCP/IP networking software called as ESP8266, has been used to help connect the microntroller with the internet wirelessly. Sensed data is monitored on-site using a Liquid Crystal Display. The ThingSpeak Cloud platform has been used to assure the remote monitoring of the sensed data, and further analytics can be done through it. Actuators namely the solenoid valve, cooling fan, and heating bulb are immediately triggered in case the limit level of the environmental parameters been sensed, has been exceeded. The Global System for Mobile Communication has been used to provide notification to the farmers cell phone farmers in case of critical conditions.  The results of the system are provided in form of waveforms observed through the ThingSpeak for the sensed parameters, others are in form of notification through LCD and GSM, and the actions performed by the solenoid valve, cooling fan and Heating bulb in case the sensed environment data goes beyond the required level

E. Ostrom’s SES Framework to Understand the Factors of Successful and Unsuccessful Situation in the SES: A meta-analysis of community forests in Mexico

The social-ecological systems are inherently complex and their destruction is highly due to a limited understanding of the processes that lead to their improvements in or deterioration. In an effort to respond to this problem, E. Ostrom and colleagues associated with the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University developed a Social-Ecological System (SES) framework. however, even if the importance of SES framework to enhance the sustainability of complex social-ecological systems is highly accepted, its implication to understand the functionality of the SESs which may leads to successful or unsuccessful situations is still lacking. In this paper, referring to the context of decomposability of complex systems, and using E. Ostrom SES framework theory and a meta-analysis of 31 case studies of community forests in Mexico, the importance of using this framework in the course of explaining variable interactions and configurations to achieve desired system outcomes is explained.Os sistemas sócio-ecológicos são intrinsecamente complexos e a sua destruição é geralmente atribuída a uma compreensão limitada dos processos que levam à sua melhoria ou deterioração. Em um esforço para responder a esse problema, E. Ostrom e colegas associados com o Workshop em Teoria Política e Análise de Políticas da Universidade de Indiana desenvolveram uma estrutura de Sistema Sócio-Ecológico (SES). Entretanto, mesmo se a importância da estrutura SES para melhorar a sustentabilidade de sistemas sociais e ecológicos complexos for altamente aceita, a implicação no entendimento das funcionalidades do SESs que pode levar a situações bem-sucedidas ou mal sucedidas ainda é uma lacuna. Neste artigo, referindo-se ao contexto de decomposibilidade de sistemas complexos e utilizando a teoria de estrutura SES de E. Ostrom e uma meta-análise de 31 estudos de caso de florestas comunitárias no México, a importância de usar essa estrutura no intuito de explicar as interações e configurações variáveis para alcançar resultados desejados do sistema será explicada

Optimal Design of Hybrid Renewable Energy Systems

Utilization of renewable energy sources such as wind and solar can overcome environmental threats associated with fossil fuels. But expensive power producing and storage components are required to harness and store renewable energy. In addition renewable sources are intermittent, thus unreliable when used independently

Control measures of malaria transmission in Rwanda based on SEIR SEI mathematical model

This research paper investigated the dynamics of malaria transmission in Rwanda using the nonlinear forces of infections which are included in SEIR-SEI mathematical model for human and mosquito populations. The mathematical modeling of malaria studies the interaction among the human and mosquito populations in controlling malaria transmission and eventually eliminating malaria infection. This work investigates the optimal control strategies for minimizing the rate of malaria transmission by applying three control variables through Caputo fractional derivative. The optimal control problems for malaria model found the control parameters which minimize infection. The numerical simulation showed that the number of exposed and infected people and mosquito population are decreased due to the control strategies. Finally, this work found out that the transmission of malaria in Rwanda can be minimized by using the combination of controls like Insecticide Treated bed Nets (ITNs), Indoor Residual Spray (IRS) and Artemisinin based Combination Therapies (ACTs)

Potential Impact of Rwanda Energy Plan on Carbon Emissions from Electricity Generation

Energy is indispensable to economic & social development and it improves lives. However, much of world’s energy is being produced and consumed in ways that could not be sustained if technology were to remain constant and if general quantities were to rise significantly. This research weighs the potential results of Rwanda energy power plan 2023/2024 that encourage the use of more advanced and sustainable energy sources, Specific attention is paid to renewable energy. This research focused on examining the carbon emission emitted through electricity generation from different energy sources and investigate carbon emission avoidance when a national energy plan is implemented. The government of Rwanda, through its power sector, has very ambitious targets to achieve 512 MW installed power generation capacity, from its current 264 MW power generation, and have universal access (100%) by 2023/24. Business as usual (BAU) scenario is used to analyze future electricity generation and CO2 emissions reduction in 2020-2024. The scenarios show the sustainable potential of renewable technologies and advanced technologies such as hydropower that can generate a significant portion of electricity and minimize the carbon emissions from the power sector. This research found that when Rwanda energy plan is implemented, there will be a carbon emission reduction of 18.3%. Hence, recommends policymakers and private sectors to invest in power energy production in Rwanda as there is a demand for electricity and business opportunities available in hydroelectricity production. Keywords: Carbon emission, Renewable energy, Electricity generation, Rwanda DOI: 10.7176/JESD/12-6-01 Publication date:March 31st 202

Communicating to Improve Compliance: Taxpayers’ Feedback on Message and Mode of Delivery in Rwanda

International Centre for Tax and Development (ICTD) Working Paper 59The journey from coercion to persuasion to drive tax compliance started gradually for the Rwanda Revenue Authority (RRA). This is shown in the mission and core value statements that underpin the tax administration’s activities in service delivery and trade facilitation. Recently the RRA has undertaken aggressive tax education and sensitisation campaigns in order to influence taxpayer behaviour towards more voluntary compliance, having limited resources to undertake enforcement. In the absence of any significant impact evaluation, however, it is hard to determine the effect of these endeavours on the intended outcome of voluntary compliance. The tax administration had the opportunity to review the effectiveness of its communication strategy through a tax compliance experiment, which involved delivering various messages using different means and evaluating taxpayer behaviour. Although many taxpayers reacted positively to these messages, particularly through upward revisions to their tax returns, there were a significant number whose reactions were not captured – necessitating a further study to investigate why these taxpayers had not reacted in any way. This paper reveals some interesting findings from this study, including the need to remind taxpayers more frequently, and to provide additional information on top of reminders. The paper also shows that taxpayers prefer to receive information on usage of public funds instead of threatening messages (deterrent), which is consistent with the findings of the tax compliance experiment

Services Delivery in Local Government and Empowerment of Female Headed Households: The Case of Huye District, Rwanda

This study “Services delivery in local government and empowerment of female headed households” was carried out in order to explore the community development services delivered in Huye district and how they impact on the empowerment process of female headed households (FHHs) in particular. It is an exploratory study that used mainly qualitative approach and survey design. Questionnaire, interview and focus group discussion were mostly used to collect data and thematic analysis to discuss the results. Findings revealed that FHHs participate actively in community development services (CDS) offered through various programs such Girinka program (one cow per poor family program), Umurenge SACCO, Vision 2020 Umurenge Program (VUP) and Intambwe Groups; where gender equality is highly observed. Respondents declared that CDS were an opportunity for FHHs and other poor people to participate in income generating activities. The credit and saving services are offered mainly via Umurenge SACCO and Intambwe groups and this prevents them not always rely on governmental support. Through national women council (CNF) and Umugoroba w’ababyeyi (women evening gatherings), local leaders report about the family and CDS related issues. Most of the time, community members select among them who should participate or benefit from a given service to testify the accountability and transparency in local government; even though it has been noted that in some areas, local authorities decide on their behalf. Nevertheless, family size, old age and level of education, have been raised among the issues that hinder the empowerment process of FHHs. The strategies already undertaken are family planning programs, financial support for old people and free basic education. Given the insufficiency of those strategies, the researcher recommends the local government to closely follow-up the implementation of CDS, sensitizing men about gender equality; and finally to increase the level of transparency in the CDS provision