Anchor Borrower Programme on Agricultural Commodity Price and Employment Generation in Kebbi State, Nigeria

Low investment in the agricultural sector, as well as problem of financing are among the major challenges hindering farmers in the rural areas engaging in mechanized farming that might increase food supply, and thereby checking the agricultural commodity prices, and possibly creating more job opportunity in the agricultural sector. In an effort to meet the food supply for the growing population of the country, the government introduced various policies aimed at achieving self-sufficiency in basic food supply, among these policies is the Anchor Borrower Programme. This study examines the impact of Anchor Borrower Program on agricultural commodity price and employment generation in Kebbi state, Nigeria. Data were collected through interview and structured questionnaire administered to a sample of 400 farmers in Argungu L.G.A, of which 360 questionnaire were correctly filled and returned. A multiple regression analysis was used to analyse the data. The results reveal that Anchor Borrower Programmes (ABP) supports for farmer have a positive and statistically significant impact on agricultural commodity price (ACP) and employment generation (EMPG) in agricultural sector in Kebbi state, particularly in Argungu LGA. Based on the findings of this study, it is recommended that anchor borrower programme policy in Nigeria should be encouraged and subjected to periodic review so as to provide more platforms for employment generation and stabilize agricultural commodity price in Kebbi state, particularly in Argungu LGA

WATERMAN: an operational soil water balance model compatible with IBSNAT data files

The CERES crop growth simulation models for sorghum, maize and mUlet. and other models like SOYGKO and PNUTGRO are ,becoming widely used for various applications in agricullure. Thew models use data fllw whose structure was developed by IBSNAT. As the use of theae models becomes more widespread the amount of data coded in the IBSNAT format will become more readily available. There 14 therefore, an advantage in having an operational, dedicated, soil water balance model compatible with the XBSNAT data format ao that water balance analws can be done without reformatting the data. WATERMAN is a model developed to achieve this objective. The program obtains the required weather, soil and crop information from the EXP.DIR and WM.DIR files. All required mil profile variables of the chosen soil type are then input from the SPROFILE* file. The user can select several applications, such as dally or periodic soil water balance, daily water contents of various layers and irrigation scheduling with or without consideration of rainfall probabilities Test runs at Samaru. Nigeria, gave acceptable results

Effect of Water Temperature on the Mechanical Properties of Water Quenched Medium Carbon Steel

The effect of water temperature on the hardness and impact strength of water quenched medium carbon steel was investigated. Two medium carbon steel, 0.33 wt % C and 0.42 wt % C, were heated to 900 oC and quenched in water at temperatures ranging from 35 oC (room temperature) to 95 oC. The results showed that hardness was reduced by over 18% and impact strength was improved by over 50%. The hard martensite structure which usually makes quenched steels highly brittle and of low toughness was replaced by tempered martensite structures thereby impacting better mechanical properties in the steel. Keywords: Water quenched temperature, Thermal Diffusivity, Hardness, Toughnes

Testicular morphology and seminal fluid parameters of adult Wistar rats following honey administration

Purpose: Honey has a long history of use in the traditional medical systems This objective of this study was to find out the effects of honey on quality and quantity of sperm and testicular microstructure when compared to fertility boosting drug and controls.Methods: A total number of thirty (30) matured male Wistar rats that were sexually active weighing 200 - 280g were used for this study. The animals were grouped into five as A - E. Group A was the control; Group B (standard group) was the standard group that received 0.3ml of follicle stimulating hormone (FSH) drug for 6 days; groups C, D and E received 1ml, 2ml, and 2.5ml of honey daily for 21days respectively. After 21 days of administration, the testes were removed for analysis of the sperm parameters and the histology.Results: Honey significantly improved the sperm quality and spermatogenesis rate (denser seminiferous tubule lumen) of exposed animals compared to control animals, but most improvement was seen in the standard group that received 0.3ml FSH. Also no sign of degeneration or cellular loss was observable in the testicular histo-architecture of experimental animals.Conclusion: This research showed that honey possesses some fertility boosting properties in exposed animals compared to controls and honey is not associated with increased sperm abnormalities.Keywords: Honey, Fertility booster, Spermatozoa, Ologospermi

Timing and Circumstances of First Sex Among Female and Male Youth From Select Urban Areas of Nigeria, Kenya, and Senegal

To examine the timing and circumstances of first sex among urban female and male youth in Kenya, Nigeria, and Senegal

The Role of Gender Empowerment on Reproductive Health Outcomes in Urban Nigeria

To date, limited evidence is available for urban populations in sub-Saharan Africa, specifically research into the association between urban women’s empowerment and reproductive health outcomes. The objective of this study is to investigate whether women’s empowerment in urban Nigerian settings is associated with family planning use and maternal health behaviors. Moreover, we examine whether different effects of empowerment exist by region of residence

MasakhaNER 2.0: Africa-centric Transfer Learning for Named Entity Recognition

African languages are spoken by over a billion people, but are underrepresented in NLP research and development. The challenges impeding progress include the limited availability of annotated datasets, as well as a lack of understanding of the settings where current methods are effective. In this paper, we make progress towards solutions for these challenges, focusing on the task of named entity recognition (NER). We create the largest human-annotated NER dataset for 20 African languages, and we study the behavior of state-of-the-art cross-lingual transfer methods in an Africa-centric setting, demonstrating that the choice of source language significantly affects performance. We show that choosing the best transfer language improves zero-shot F1 scores by an average of 14 points across 20 languages compared to using English. Our results highlight the need for benchmark datasets and models that cover typologically-diverse African languages

BLOOM: A 176B-Parameter Open-Access Multilingual Language Model

Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to be able to perform new tasks based on a few demonstrations or natural language instructions. While these capabilities have led to widespread adoption, most LLMs are developed by resource-rich organizations and are frequently kept from the public. As a step towards democratizing this powerful technology, we present BLOOM, a 176B-parameter open-access language model designed and built thanks to a collaboration of hundreds of researchers. BLOOM is a decoder-only Transformer language model that was trained on the ROOTS corpus, a dataset comprising hundreds of sources in 46 natural and 13 programming languages (59 in total). We find that BLOOM achieves competitive performance on a wide variety of benchmarks, with stronger results after undergoing multitask prompted finetuning. To facilitate future research and applications using LLMs, we publicly release our models and code under the Responsible AI License

Carbapenem resistance expressed by Gram-negative bacilli isolated from a cohort of Libyan patients

Background and objectives: Carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE) and other Gram-negative bacteria are among the most common pathogens responsible for both community and hospital acquired infection. The global spread of cephalosporinases in Enterobacteriaceae has led to the increased use of carbapenems resulting in the emergence and rapid spread of CRE. This has become an alarming public health concern, yet the condition in Libya remains unclear. The aim of this study was to obtain a better understanding of CRE strains prevalent in Libyan patients by investigating their phenotypic characteristics and antibiograms. Methods: Gram-negative bacterial species were collected from Misrata Central Hospital, Misrata Cancer Centre and Privet Pathology Laboratories. Clinical samples and swabs were obtained from hospitalised and non-hospitalised patients and from mechanical ventilation and suction machines. Patients who had received antibiotic therapy for at least three days prior to the study were excluded. The identification and characterization of the isolated species were achieved using the growth characteristics on MacConkey and blood agar, spot tests and API 20E or API 20NE biochemical testing systems. Screening for carbapenem resistance was performed using the disk diffusion method with carbapenem 10 μg and cephalosporin 30 μg disks and minimum inhibitory concentrations (MIC) determined using the Sensititre Gram-negative Xtra plate format (GNX2F). All strains demonstrating resistance or reduced susceptibility to one of the four carbapenems were subjected to carbapenememase activity detection using the RAPIDEC CARBA NP test, Modified Hodge test and carbapenem inactivation methods. Results: A total of one hundred and forty isolates representing fourteen bacterial species were isolated from 140 non-duplicated specimens. Clinical specimens included urine samples (96/140, 68.57%), sputum (15/140, 10.71%), surgical wound swabs (18/140, 12.85%), foot swabs from diabetes mellitus (DM) patients (6/140, 4.29%), ear swabs (3/140, 2.14%) and wound swabs (2/140, 1.43%). Thirty-four (24.29%) isolates demonstrated resistance to at least one of the four carbapenems with Klebsiella pneumoniae representing 73.53% (25 isolates) of all carbapenem resistant species, followed by 8.82% for Pseudomonas aeruginosa (3 isolates), 5.88% for both Proteus mirabilis (2 isolates) and Escherichia coli (2 isolates) and 2.94% for both Citrobacter koseri (1 isolate) and Rahnella aquatilis (1 isolate). The other isolates were either susceptible or cephalosporinase producers. Conclusion: This study has revealed the high rate of carbapenem resistance amongst Libyan patients and emphasizes the crucial need for accurate screening, identification and susceptibility testing to prevent further spread of nosocomial and community acquired resistance. This may be achieved through the establishment of antibiotic stewardship programmes along with firm infection control practices.National Research Foundation of South Africa; Libyan GovernmentWeb of Scienc