Evaluation of Native Fungal Isolates of Metrahizium anisopliae Var. Acridum and Beauveria bassiana against the Greater Wax Moth, Galleria mellonella (L) (Pyralidae: Lepidoptera) in Ethiopia

The greater wax moth (gwm) is a widely distributed and devastating insect pest to honey production sector in Ethiopia. The present study investigated the potential of native fungal isolates against gwm and assessed the non-target effect of one isolate of Beauveria (iita 18) and five isolates of Metarhizium (imi 330189, dlco-AA83, dlco-AA 109, dlco-aa5, dlco-aa14) by inoculating Ethiopian honeybee race, Apis mellifera bandasii. The effects of these six fungal isolates were evaluated in the laboratory for their pathogenicity to adult greater wax moths. Adult gwms were found to be susceptible to all isolates and concentrations used. Greater than 90% adult greater wax moth (gwm) mortality was achieved 13 days post-inoculation. The on host specificity test of Metarhizium and the Beauveria isolates on Apis melifera bandasii also showed no significant effects on honey bees. No significant effects (P> 0.05) of mycosis on adult emergence from last larval instar gwms inoculated by different spore concentrations ( 2x104 , 2x105 , 2x106 , 2x107 conidia /ml) before entering into pupation

Literature review and economic analysis of crop response to phosphate rocks in eastern Africa

Assesses the performance of phosphate rock compared to other phosphates on cereals and feed crops, and the conditions under which it raises yield. Anayses its profitability

Determinants of mortality among one to four years old children in Ethiopia: A study based on the 2011 EDHS data

Background: According to the UN report for the 10 years before 2011, the mortality rate for under-five children has decreased by 35% worldwide. UNICEF reported that Ethiopia reduced under-five mortality by 40% over the 15 years before 2008. From the EDHS 2011 report child mortality rate in Ethiopia went down from 50 out of 1000 deaths in 2005 to 31 out of 1000 in 2011. Despite this encouraging development the country is expected to do more to bring down child mortality rate to a lower level.Objectives: This study was done to estimate the survival of one to four years old children in Ethiopia and to identify determinants of mortality for this age group of children.Methods: The study used the 2011 Ethiopian Demographic and Health Survey data. Survival analysis was employed to analyze the data on 12,710 children.Results: The results showed that the predictors mother’s education, mother’s age, marital status, birth order(s) and place of residence had significant impact on child mortality. On the other hand sex of a child, family size, wealth index, water source and toilet facility were not found to be significant.Conclusion: A lot of effort has to be made to intensify educating females so as to alleviate their level of empowerment. The concerned government and nongovernment bodies, the media and the wider community should discourage early marriage. Due to the fact that a much larger proportion of child mortality occurred in rural areas of the country, it is necessary to avail child and mothers maternal care services infrastructure outside the urban areas

Does export dependency hurt economic development? Empirical evidence from Singapore

A rapid export growth in East Asia was once identified as a source of the sustainable economic development that the region enjoyed. However, the current global recession has turned exports from an economic virtue to a vice. There is a growing awareness that a heavy reliance on exports has caused a serious economic downturn in the region. The present paper chooses Singapore as a case study to examine the relationship between the origin of the East Asian Miracle (i.e. export dependency) and the economic growth. For this purpose, the study employs a causality test developed by Toda and Yamamoto. The empirical findings indicate that despite a negative long-run relationship between export dependency and economic growth, Singapore's heavy reliance on exports does not seem to have produced negative effects on the nation's economic growth. This is because the increase in export dependency was an effect, and not a cause, of the country's output expansion.

Adoption of climate smart technologies in East Africa: Findings from two surveys and participatory exercises with farmers and local experts

As part of the “Policy Action for Climate Change Adaptation” (PACCA) project this info note summarizes findings of a project activity entitled “Influencing and linking policies and institutions from national to local level for the development and adoption of climate‐resilient food systems in East Africa” undertaken by researchers from Bioversity International and Arizona State University. By conducting a network analysis and participatory exercises with district officials and farmers, the study assesses the extent to which farmers are adopting agricultural practices and correlates the findings about the size and “make up” of the networks in which the farmers are embedded

Influence of social networks on the adoption of climate smart technologies in East Africa: Findings from two surveys and participatory exercises with farmers and local experts

As part of the Policy Action for Climate Change Adaptation (PACCA) project, this info note summarizes findings of a project activity entitled “Influencing and linking policies and institutions from national to local level for the development and adoption of climate‐resilient food systems in East Africa” undertaken by researchers from Bioversity International and Arizona State University. By conducting a network analysis and participatory exercises with district officials and farmers in Lushoto (Tanzania) and Rakai (Uganda), the study assesses the extent to which farmers are adopting agricultural practices and correlates the findings about the size and “make up” of the networks in which the farmers are embedded

Made-to-measure malaria vector control strategies: rational design based on insecticide properties and coverage of blood resources for mosquitoes.

Eliminating malaria from highly endemic settings will require unprecedented levels of vector control. To suppress mosquito populations, vector control products targeting their blood hosts must attain high biological coverage of all available sources, rather than merely high demographic coverage of a targeted resource subset, such as humans while asleep indoors. Beyond defining biological coverage in a measurable way, the proportion of blood meals obtained from humans and the proportion of bites upon unprotected humans occurring indoors also suggest optimal target product profiles for delivering insecticides to humans or livestock. For vectors that feed only occasionally upon humans, preferred animal hosts may be optimal targets for mosquito-toxic insecticides, and vapour-phase insecticides optimized to maximize repellency, rather than toxicity, may be ideal for directly protecting people against indoor and outdoor exposure. However, for vectors that primarily feed upon people, repellent vapour-phase insecticides may be inferior to toxic ones and may undermine the impact of contact insecticides applied to human sleeping spaces, houses or clothing if combined in the same time and place. These concepts are also applicable to other mosquito-borne anthroponoses so that diverse target species could be simultaneously controlled with integrated vector management programmes. Measurements of these two crucial mosquito behavioural parameters should now be integrated into programmatically funded, longitudinal, national-scale entomological monitoring systems to inform selection of available technologies and investment in developing new ones

Methods and Costs for Pond-Catchment Rehabilitation on the Borana Plateau

The Borana Plateau is an important rangeland for Ethiopia. One key limitation for people and livestock is lack of drinking water. Hundreds of ponds are important water sources for most of the year. Pond catchments are poorly managed because livestock access is uncontrolled. Catchments are stripped bare of vegetation due to trampling and heavy grazing, and unprotected soil is prone to erosion. When the rains come the ponds quickly fill with sediment. Sedimentation reduces pond holding capacity and much labor is required to clean them out. As part of a pilot research project we rehabilitated four ponds and their immediate catchment using a combination of: (1) Perimeter bush-fencing to confine livestock access to a few narrow corridors leading to the water\u27s edge; (2) erosion control using dams and trenches to capture sediment prior to it entering the ponds; and (3) pond de-sedimentation using human labor. In tandem these methods have completely renovated the four sites in less than two years and could be adopted by the pastoralists. Here we report how we implemented each method as well as estimate the total cost of rehabilitation. Overall, the average cost to rehabilitate one seven-hectare pond catchment was 283, 045 Ethiopian Birr (or USD $14,152) including cash and in-kind sources. Costs were almost entirely labor. The largest outlay was for de-sedimentation at 87 percent of total costs on average, followed by erosion control (9 percent) and bush fencing (4 percent). If all 162 ponds in our study area were rehabilitated the cost would exceed 46 million Birr; this might be defrayed if communities can donate some of the labor. The high cost of rehabilitation illustrates that poor catchment management has major economic consequences that undermine system sustainability. Cost data also reveal that a small investment in preventing sedimentation via bush-fencing, grazing management, and erosion control would yield high returns in terms of reducing the need for regular, and expensive de-sedimentation via manual labor

Mean Field Theory of Josephson Junction Arrays with Charge Frustration

Using the path integral approach, we provide an explicit derivation of the equation for the phase boundary for quantum Josephson junction arrays with offset charges and non-diagonal capacitance matrix. For the model with nearest neighbor capacitance matrix and uniform offset charge $q/2e=1/2$, we determine, in the low critical temperature expansion, the most relevant contributions to the equation for the phase boundary. We explicitly construct the charge distributions on the lattice corresponding to the lowest energies. We find a reentrant behavior even with a short ranged interaction. A merit of the path integral approach is that it allows to provide an elegant derivation of the Ginzburg-Landau free energy for a general model with charge frustration and non-diagonal capacitance matrix. The partition function factorizes as a product of a topological term, depending only on a set of integers, and a non-topological one, which is explicitly evaluated.Comment: LaTex, 24 pages, 8 figure