GENDER ANALYSIS: INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY (ICT) ADOPTION AMONG RURAL FARM DWELLERS IN OYO STATE, NIGERIA

The high illiteracy level in most rural communities of Nigeria is not representative of positive impacts that Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have had on Nigerian rural agriculture in terms of productivity, growth and development. The study investigated the adoption of ICTs among rural farm dwellers in Iseyin Local Government Area of Oyo state, Nigeria, using gender analysis. A well-structured interview schedule was employed to elicit quantitative information from 60 male and 60 female rural farm dwellers from Serafu, Ado-awaye and Osoogun in Iseyin Local Government Areas, using the two stage random sampling procedure. Results showed that 55% of the male respondents and 46.7% of the female respondents adopted various selected ICTs in general. Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) at <0.05 level of significance resulted that a significant difference exists in the adoption of the ICTs of both male and female respondents (F= 4.198). The findings revealed that at <0.05 level of significance, significant difference existed in the level of income of the male and female respondents (F= 4.079). The study revealed that male farmers adopted ICTs more than their female counterparts, and there were significant gender gaps in ICT adoption among rural farm dwellers in Nigeria. Therefore, in order to bridge the gender gap in the level of adoption of ICTs, among rural dwellers, it was recommended that various ICTs should be made available for rural dwellers at subsidized rate because larger percentage of them are aware of the importance and benefits of ICTs but lack the financial capacity to acquire them. The government should formulate policy that will enhance continuous development, dissemination, and utilization of gender responsive ICTs for farming activities and for development of rural livelihood, in Nigeria

Gender analysis of constraints to get vegetable production in Ondo State, Nigeria

Vegetable cultivation has become a highly commercialised enterprise, but with a wide gap between current production and potential production. The study therefore assessed the constraints facing vegetable production on gender basis. The study was conducted in the two Ondo State’s ADP agro-ecological zones. A two-stage sampling technique was used as a framework for selecting the respondents. The first stage involved a random selection of ten ADP’s villages from each of the agro-ecological zones while the second stage involved a random selection of six ADP vegetable farmers from each of the selected villages making a total of one hundred and twenty respondents for the study. However, one hundred and seventeen interviewed schedules were suitable for analysis. The findings revealed that majority of the vegetable farmers were found in age group of 30-60 years with a mean age of 46.87 and the mean household size was found to be 6.38 persons per house with low farm size of between 0.25 to 0.50 hectare. Men and women vegetable farmers in Ondo State faced same constraints such non-availability of land, inadequacy of inputs, lack of extension contact, transportation, storage, high cost of input etc but at different degrees. The study concludes that the variations in degrees of constraints between men and women vegetable farmers in Ondo State are due to the differences in roles and responsibilities of each gender along the vegetable production chain. The study therefore recommends that there is a need for gender integration into programme that could enhance the production of vegetables and thus increase the farmers’ income and the general standard of living

Selective mechanical transfer of graphene from seed copper foil using rate effects

A very fast, dry transfer process based on mechanical delamination successfully effected the transfer of large-area, CVD grown graphene on copper foil to silicon. This has been achieved by bonding silicon backing layers to both sides of the graphene-coated copper foil with epoxy and applying a suitably high separation rate to the backing layers. At the highest separation rate considered (254.0 ??m/s), monolayer graphene was completely transferred from the copper foil to the target silicon substrate. On the other hand, the lowest rate (25.4 ??m/s) caused the epoxy to be completely separated from the graphene. Fracture mechanics analyses were used to determine the adhesion energy between graphene and its seed copper foil (6.0 J/m2) and between graphene and the epoxy (3.4 J/m2) at the respective loading rates. Control experiments for the epoxy/silicon interface established a rate dependent adhesion, which supports the hypothesis that the adhesion of the graphene/epoxy interface was higher than that of the graphene/copper interface at the higher separation rate, thereby providing a controllable mechanism for selective transfer of graphene in future nanofabrication systems such as roll-to-roll transferclose5