Retail Market Prices of Fonio Reveal The Demand For Quality Characteristics in Bamako, Mali

African consumers' expectations concerning the quality of food products are great. In spite of constrained budgets, we showed that market retail prices revealed quality preferences of the consumers and not just production costs. In very poor countries like Mali, food innovation is limited by the very low purchasing power of the population. However, technological food product or process innovations are possible and sometimes valuable. Demand driven innovation may lead to open new markets, opportunities for small and medium scale enterprises and to improve consumers' welfare. Based on this assumption, technical research was done to provide new food products. In this paper, we used both sensory tests and a hedonic price approach, to estimate the consumers' demand for different characteristics of fonio, a West African cereal, and showed that poor consumers have quality requirements and pay for them. We showed that the shadow price or hedonic price paid for quality characteristics is small but significant. A comparison between sensory tests and a market study showed a convergence between what people say they prefer and what they really pay for. Results were consistent and showed directions for technological improvement of the product and its production process. The partial least square method was used to estimate hedonic prices of the different modalities of fonio quality traits. This method was interesting since it solved the ordinary least square method's colinearity problems. ...French Abstract : Les attentes des consommateurs africains concernant la qualité de l'alimentation sont importantes malgré des budgets très contraints. Nous montrons ici que les prix de marchés révèlent des préférences qualitatives et non seulement des coûts de production. Dans des pays très pauvres comme le Mali, l'innovation technologique est limitée par le très faible pouvoir d'achat de la population. Cependant les innovations technologiques sont possibles et parfois payantes. L'innovation en réponse à une demande peut permettre d'ouvrir de nouveaux marchés, de donner des opportunités aux petites et moyennes entreprises et d'améliorer le bien-être des consommateurs. Sur la base de cette hypothèse, la recherche technologique s'applique à fournir de nouveaux produits. Dans cet article, en utilisant à la fois des tests de dégustation et une analyse des prix hédoniques, nous estimons la demande des consommateurs pour différentes caractéristiques du fonio, une céréale d'Afrique de l'Ouest. Nous montrons que des consommateurs pauvres ont des exigences de qualité et paient de fait pour les satisfaire. Nous montrons que les prix hédoniques ou shadow prices payés pour les caractéristiques qualitatives sont faibles mais significatifs. La comparaison des tests sensoriels et de l'étude de marché montre une convergence entre ce que les gens disent et ce pour quoi ils paient réellement. Les résultats sont cohérents et montrent des directions pour l'amélioration technologique des produits et des procédés de transformation. La méthode des moindres carrés ordinaires a été utilisée pour l'estimation des prix hédoniques des différentes modalités des attributs de qualité du fonio. Cette méthode est intéressante car elle résout les problèmes de colinéarité.FONIO; CEREAL; QUALITY; HEDONIC PRICES; PLS METHOD; EMPIRICAL INVESTIGATION

Résumé des résultats des enquêtes de base niveau ménage : site de Cinzana, Mali Décembre 2011 L. Diakité, K. Sissoko, R. Zougmoré, B. Traoré, M. Amadou, A.S. Moussa, W. Forch,

Ce rapport présente les résultats des enquêtes de base conduites au niveau des ménages de sept villages du site de Cinzana (région de Ségou, Mali) dans le cadre du programme de recherche du CGIAR sur le Changement Climatique, l’Agriculture et la Sécurité Alimentaire. L’objectif de ces enquêtes était de de collecter toutes les données et informations sur des indicateurs clés de base concernant les ménages notamment les moyens de subsistance, l’agriculture et la gestion des ressources naturelles, les besoins d’information sur le climat et la gestion des risques, et les pratiques d’atténuation et d’adaptation

Village Baseline Study: Site Analysis Report for Segou – Cinzana, Mali (MA0109)

The village baseline study of Tongo village in the CCAFS benchmark site of Cinzana, Mali took place from 12 to 14 July 2011. Focus group discussions were conducted separately for men and women. The village has an abundance of natural resources such as savannah, grassland, ponds, farmlands and several kinds of socio-economic infrastructure. Some of the natural resources, however, are in a state of progressive degradation due to increase in human population; indiscriminate felling of trees; clearing of forests and deforestation; lack of rainfall; drought; and animal pressure

Interrupting seasonal transmission of Schistosoma haematobium and control of soil-transmitted helminthiasis in northern and central Côte d’Ivoire: a SCORE study protocol

© The Author(s). 2018 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated. The attached file is the published version of the article

Etiology and factors associated with pneumonia in children under 5 years of age in Mali: A prospective case-control study

Background: There are very limited data on children with pneumonia in Mali. The objective was to assess the etiology and factors associated with community-acquired pneumonia in hospitalized children <5 years of age in Mali. Methods: A prospective hospital-based case-control study

The effect of monthly sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine, alone or with azithromycin, on pcr-diagnosed malaria at delivery: A randomized controlled trial

10.1371/journal.pone.0041123PLoS ONE77

<i>Gaia</i> Data Release 1. Summary of the astrometric, photometric, and survey properties

Context. At about 1000 days after the launch of Gaia we present the first Gaia data release, Gaia DR1, consisting of astrometry and photometry for over 1 billion sources brighter than magnitude 20.7. Aims. A summary of Gaia DR1 is presented along with illustrations of the scientific quality of the data, followed by a discussion of the limitations due to the preliminary nature of this release. Methods. The raw data collected by Gaia during the first 14 months of the mission have been processed by the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC) and turned into an astrometric and photometric catalogue. Results. Gaia DR1 consists of three components: a primary astrometric data set which contains the positions, parallaxes, and mean proper motions for about 2 million of the brightest stars in common with the HIPPARCOS and Tycho-2 catalogues – a realisation of the Tycho-Gaia Astrometric Solution (TGAS) – and a secondary astrometric data set containing the positions for an additional 1.1 billion sources. The second component is the photometric data set, consisting of mean G-band magnitudes for all sources. The G-band light curves and the characteristics of ∼3000 Cepheid and RR-Lyrae stars, observed at high cadence around the south ecliptic pole, form the third component. For the primary astrometric data set the typical uncertainty is about 0.3 mas for the positions and parallaxes, and about 1 mas yr−1 for the proper motions. A systematic component of ∼0.3 mas should be added to the parallax uncertainties. For the subset of ∼94 000 HIPPARCOS stars in the primary data set, the proper motions are much more precise at about 0.06 mas yr−1. For the secondary astrometric data set, the typical uncertainty of the positions is ∼10 mas. The median uncertainties on the mean G-band magnitudes range from the mmag level to ∼0.03 mag over the magnitude range 5 to 20.7. Conclusions. Gaia DR1 is an important milestone ahead of the next Gaia data release, which will feature five-parameter astrometry for all sources. Extensive validation shows that Gaia DR1 represents a major advance in the mapping of the heavens and the availability of basic stellar data that underpin observational astrophysics. Nevertheless, the very preliminary nature of this first Gaia data release does lead to a number of important limitations to the data quality which should be carefully considered before drawing conclusions from the data

IFC2INDOORGML: an open-source tool for generating indoorgml from ifc

The interest in 3D indoor models has been continuously growing. Most such models are made available as point clouds or BIM (e.g., IFC), the former being generally provided as unstructured information while the latter comes highly structured and rich in semantic information. IFC models are consequently more suitable for direct use, but they can be very complex and contain too many details, which often raises privacy concerns. IndoorGML is one of the standards for describing 3D indoor space with the purpose of supporting Location Based Services (LBS). It relies on solid scientific concepts and offers a high flexibility with extension mechanisms. It provides a geometric, topological, and semantic description of the indoor which facilitates specifically applications like indoor navigation or facility management. Additionally, it can represent complex indoor environments without compromising privacy, thanks to its high level of abstraction. However, despite its solid conceptual basis, IndoorGML is suffering from a lack of practical tools and remains hard to produce, making it largely unavailable. In this project, we developed an open-source tool named ifc2indoorgml allowing to automatically generate IndoorGML models from IFC data. We discuss the workflow and the different development approaches. By making such tool available to the wider public, we expect more 3D IndoorGML models to be created and made freely available for research and development within the spatial community and beyond.Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación | Ref. RYC2020-029193-

Assessing Smallholder Farmers’ Perception on Climate Variability in Relation to Climatological Evidence: A Case Study of Benguene in the Sudanian Zone of Mali

Sudanian zone is one of the regions in West Africa most confronted with high climate variability, challenging agricultural sustainability and rural livelihoods. Despite multiple research efforts devoted to exploring how farmers in this region perceive climate variability and how perceptions relate to adaptive responses, much remains to be done. This study examined farmers’ perception of climate variability compared with scientific evidence in the terroir of Benguene, between 1983 and 2018. Data was collected from twenty-nine (29) farmland heads (representing 49% of the total farmland heads in the village) through a survey conducted in October 2019. Monthly temperature data from ground measurement and daily rainfall data extracted from the gridded African Rainfall Climatology version 2 (ARC-2) time series was used. Descriptive statistic was used to analyse survey data. Climate data analysis included Mann Kendall trend analysis and computation of growing season parameters (Onset, Duration and Cessation) and its trend. In the end, a conformity index was used to compare farmers’ perceptions to climatological evidence. Conformity graph showed that apart from temperature, the farmers have low, to a weak perception of the other variables used to assess their perception. Results showed that many smallholder farmers have observed a rise in temperature (90%), delay onset (93%) and early cessation (93%) of rainfall. The analysis of the climate data showed high variability in the climate during the study period as observed in the increasing trends in temperature (p-value of 0.0007) and in the rainfall (p-value of 0.0001). Concerning the season parameters, the results show increasingly early-onset (June 1st ± 22 days) increasingly late cessation (October 09th ± 14 days) and consequently a long duration of the rainy season (130 ± 27 days). Conversely, farmers thought the opposite. These results imply the urgent need to increase smallholder farmers awareness of climate variability and change by providing climate information for better adaptatio