An Evaluation of the Relationship Between Integrated Rural Development Scheme, Livelihood Assets and Housing Condition in Nigeria

The paper examined the relationship among integrated rural development scheme, livelihood assets and housing condition in selected rural areas in Osun state. This is necessitated by the need to look at an alternative ways of financing rural housing through self-help project. It is also inspired by the need for sustainability in better housing condition in the rural communities.The paper carried out a survey of participants of an existing integrated scheme that was established with the objective of improving farmers’ welfare through improved productivity in 28 rural communities under the jurisdiction of Justice Development and Peace Makers’ Centre (JDPMC), Osogbo, Osun state.  Data was obtained from 344 respondents selected through a multi-staged sampling across 28 rural communities in Osun state. The data obtained was analysed with the use of frequency distribution, correlation, regression and chi-square analysis.The results of the study in this paper reveals, among others, that the mode of operation and housing condition has positive relationship and are not independent of each other. Similarly, there is significant relationship between household size (r = 0.327) and housing condition, livelihood assets (r = 0.451) and housing condition at P ≤ 0.01. Based on these findings, integrated scheme has positive relationship with housing condition because the more the livelihood assets through integrated scheme, the better the rural housing condition in Nigeria.The paper therefore suggests consideration of integrated scheme as an effective strategy for rural housing improvement. The study is a pioneering attempt at establishing whether increase in participants’ assets such as physical, financial, natural, human and social capital due to the integrated scheme will lead to significant improvement in housing condition. Keywords: relationship, integrated, rural development scheme, livelihood assets, housing condition, and rural areas. DOI: 10.7176/CER/12-5-06 Publication date:May 31st 202

Breast Cancer Trend: A Case Study of a Tertiary Health Institution in Nigeria

Background: Breast cancer is a major global health problem in women from both developing and developed countries. As the leading cause of death among women, breast cancer has contributed 19.5% to the mortality rate among women in Nigeria. This study investigated the trend of breast cancer among women who attended Federal Teaching Hospital, Ido-Ekiti, Nigeria. Methods: This retrospective study examined the trend of breast cancer over a period of eight years and determined the most affected age group. Participants consisted of patients registered in the cancer registry who had histologically confirmed breast cancer. Data of 362 patients were examined between March and April 2016. Data were analyzed and presented using descriptive (frequency, charts, and percentages) and inferential statistics (Fisher’s exact) for hypothesis testing. Results: Findings of this study revealed that the mean age of the participants was 45.04±16.94 years and all patients involved were females. The age group 20-39 years was most affected by breast cancer with a proportion of 41.7%. This study revealed a relationship between breast cancer classification and age of patients (P=0.011). Almost all (94.3%) cases seen within this time period were malignant. Conclusion: Healthcare professionals should place more emphasis on prevention of breast cancer across all age groups, especially young adults. These young adults constitute the larger percentage of the adult population. An increase in mortality rate in this age group will reduce the labor force and affect the nation’s economy

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)

LEVEL OF USE OF GIS FOR LAND REGISTRATION, LAGOS STATE, NIGERIA

The population in Lagos state, Nigeria is not only rapid but alarming. This study investigates the level of GIS in use for Land registration in the state. In Lagos State, the ministry responsible for land policy and land matters is the Lands Bureau. For this study, both primary and secondary data were used. Primary data was sourced from the principal officials of professional directorates at Lands Bureau who were involved in land registration process of the State using both structured interview and questionnaire multi-modes. Findings revealed that GIS had not been fully introduced into the overall activities. It is gradually being introduced. Hence the level of use of GIS is still decentralized with each departments focusing on its GIS tasks at a time. It is recommended that the Lagos State Government should continue to put necessary infrastructure for the development of a robust land registration system for the state