Toolbox value creation final report (WP-101)

This document contains the deliverables of TransForum project WP-101, Toolbox Value Creation. Its contents allow users to use a summary analysis toolbox made for charting and improving value chains in the areas of People, Planet and Profit. Features of the toolbox are: Guidance in organizing a quick scan and change process. Create summary graphic overview of the materials balance of a production network. Model People and Planet and Profit separately but in conjunction. Allow flexible inclusion or omission of actors, processes and products. Analyze value of improvements

Toolbox Value Creation Handbook : Charting People, Planet and Profit in Value Chains

To create a sustainable society companies need new data and information regarding e.g. environmental and societal impacts of new products or processes are necessary, but these are often missing. Information systems can play an important role here and many tools are already developed. It became clear that one crucial tool was lacking: One that (a) integrates People, Planet, and Profit value (b) focuses on the whole production chains and (c) allows flexible data input. A new tool, QChain, was born. QChain is meant for anybody who works on sustainability issues, aiming to create a sustainable production chain. In practice this will often be policy makers, champions, consultants and network coordinators that work on a sustainability problem or valorisation issues. The tool is especially useful in organizations that feel the need or want to create the need to not only focus on profit, but also reckon with people and planet value – their licence to produce. QChain is a drawing tool that supports shared value creation for sustainable production chains

Integrated Solution Support System for Water Management

Solving water management problems involves technical, social, economic, political and legal challenges and thus requires an integrated approach involving people from different backgrounds and roles. The integrated approach has been given a prominent role within the European Union¿s Water Framework Directive (WFD). The WFD requires an integrated approach in water management to achieve good ecological status of all water bodies. It consists amongst others of the following main planning stages: describing objectives, assessing present state, identifying gaps between objectives and present state, developing management plan, implementing measures and evaluating their impacts. The directive prescribes broad participation and consultation to achieve its objectives. Besides the obvious desktop software, such an integrated approach can benefit from using a variety of support tools. In addition to tools for specific tasks such as numerical models and questionnaires, knowledge bases on options and process support tools may be utilized. Water stress, defined as the lack of water of appropriate quality is one issue related to, but not specifically addressed by the WFD. However, like in the WFD, a participatory approach could be used to mitigate water stress. Similarly various tools can or need to be used in such a complex process. In the AquaStress Integrated project the Integrated Solution Support System (I3S ¿ I-triple-S) is developed. One of the cornerstones of the approach taken in AquaStress is that organizing available knowledge provides sufficient information to improve the possibility to make a water stress mitigation process truly end-user driven, meaning that dedicated local information is only collected after specific need is expressed by the stakeholders in the process. The novelty of the I3S lies in the combination of such knowledge stored in knowledge-bases, with adaptable workflow management facilities and with specific task-oriented tools ¿ all originating from different sources. This paper describes the I3S

Vernal keratoconjunctivitis among primary school students in Butajira Town

Background: In Ethiopia, there is no epidemiological data on the magnitude of vernal keratoconjunctivitis (VKC) in the community.Aim: The purpose of this study was to identify the magnitude, types, related family allergy and complications of VKC among school children of Butajira town.Methods: This cross-sectional study was conducted between January 1st and February 28th 2008 to clinically evaluate students of Butajira primary school for the presence of VKC. Stratified random sampling of all grades was used to identify the study population. An operational definition was set to classify the types of VKC and hand held slit lamp microscope was used to examine all study subjects.Results: A total of 792 students, 348 (43.9%) males and 444 (56.1%) females, were screened. VKC was diagnosed in 41 (5.2%) of the cases. Out of the cases, 26 (63.4%) were males and 15 (36.6%) were females, making a male to female ratio of 1.7:1. The majority of VKC patients, 23 (56.2%) were between 11 and 15 years of age. Limbal, mixed and palpebral types of VKC were seen in 24 (58.5%), 12 (29.3%) and 5 (12.2%) cases, respectively. Related family allergy was obtained in 5 (12.2%) cases. Keratoconus and corneal ulceration were not foundConclusion: The finding of 5.2% VKC cases indicates that the disease is one of the common causes of ocular morbidity among the study population. As VKC is a chronic, recurrent condition, school health education about its supportive and symptomatic management need to be given to teachers and students

Towards a service-oriented e-infrastructure for multidisciplinary environmental research

Research e-infrastructures are considered to have generic and thematic parts. The generic part provids high-speed networks, grid (large-scale distributed computing) and database systems (digital repositories and data transfer systems) applicable to all research commnities irrespective of discipline. Thematic parts are specific deployments of e-infrastructures to support diverse virtual research communities. The needs of a virtual community of multidisciplinary envronmental researchers are yet to be investigated. We envisage and argue for an e-infrastructure that will enable environmental researchers to develop environmental models and software entirely out of existing components through loose coupling of diverse digital resources based on the service-oriented achitecture. We discuss four specific aspects for consideration for a future e-infrastructure: 1) provision of digital resources (data, models & tools) as web services, 2) dealing with stateless and non-transactional nature of web services using workflow management systems, 3) enabling web servce discovery, composition and orchestration through semantic registries, and 4) creating synergy with existing grid infrastructures

Levels of fluoride in bottled soft drinks marketed in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

The main objective of this study was to determine the levels of fluoride in soft drinks (Coca Cola, Pepsi, Mirinda, Fanta and Sprite) marketed and widely consumed in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Three glass-bottled and three plastic-bottled soft drink samples from each brand were purchased randomly from Arat Kilo, Shiromeda and Shola supermarkets, kiosk and tea houses in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Levels of fluoride in the soft drink samples were determined by fluoride ion selective electrode. The method was validated by spiking test which provided percentage recoveries of fluoride in the soft drinks in the range 91-96%. The mean fluoride concentration (mg/L) in the glass-bottled and plastic-bottled soft drink samples, respectively, were: Coca Cola (0.03±0.01, 0.06±0.01), Pepsi (0.23±0.01, 0.10±0.01), Mirinda (0.21±0.02, 0.09±0.01), Fanta (0.03±0.01, 0.05±0.01) and Sprite (0.04±0.01, 0.27±0.01). Pearson correlation showed that the levels of fluoride in the soft drinks were found to correlate positively with each other, which indicates similar source of main component (the water used for dilution). The low levels of fluoride in the soft drinks may not impose health risk in the adults but excessive consumption of soft drinks regularly by the children may result in dental fluorosis.               KEY WORDS: Fluoride, Coca cola, Pepsi, Mirinda, Fanta, Sprite Bull. Chem. Soc. Ethiop. 2019, 33(2), 203-213.DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.4314/bcse.v33i2.

The effect of business process reengineering (BPR) on public sector organisation performance in a developing economy context

This research develops a research model to analyse whether the implementation of BPR by public organisations in the developing economies contributes to the business process and overall organisational performance. BPR has been widely adopted by private businesses and has been a focus of research since the 1990s and it is still one of the top five management concerns for information technology (IT) executives globally. However, BPR’s adoption in the public sector in general, and public sectors in developing economies in particular, is a relatively recent and little researched phenomenon. The concept of New Public Management (NPM) and public sector pressure for administration efficiency, transparency, good governance, accountability and e-Government is the major driving force behind embracing and practicing BPR by the public sector in the developing economies. Public sector BPR literature shows that there is lack of research that theorises validates and develops a measurement model to evaluate the organisational performance effect of public sector BPR in general and those in developing economies in particular. Given the fact that developing economies are investing heavily in BPR with the aim of modernising public administration, there is, therefore, a need for empirical investigation of whether BPR is improving their performance. Hence, the main research question addressed in this research is: Does BPR matter to the performance of public sector organisations? The research’s conceptual foundation is based on resource-based view (RBV) theory and its complementary competence perspective; BPR literature and the public sector organisation performance literature; and from findings of the exploratory study. The framework establishes the relationships between BPR resources and implementation issues, BPR depth and BPR outcome and impact, and develops 13 hypotheses. The research pursues the positivist paradigm. Both interview (n = 16) and survey (n = 209) methods are used to collect data in two stages—exploratory study and main study—from public administration organisations in Ethiopia. The psychometric properties of the survey instrument are established through a rigorous procedure involving exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis techniques, using SPSS and AMOS, respectively. The findings show that a public sector organisation in a developing economy can use BPR to improve process and overall organisational performance if it (a) has accumulated stock of BPR-relevant resources and capabilities; (b) has undertaken BPR with sufficient depth; (c) is developing a post-BPR complementary competencies to sustain and further enhance the BPR changes; and (d) has mitigated the negative effect of BPR implementation problems. The research model explains 54% and 40% of the variance in organisational and business process performance, respectively. The research makes an original contribution to public sector BPR literature through its development and validation of the model and accompanying measurement instrument. In particular, the conception, measurement, hypotheses and empirical findings of the BPR complementary competency construct represent a significant contribution in advancing the theoretical foundation and the empirical basis of the BPR, public sector BPR and developing economy BPR literature. The research also offers relevant recommendations to public managers and BPR practitioners on how to execute BPR successfully

Inter simple sequence repeat (ISSR) analysis of Ethiopian white lupine (Lupinus albus L.)

White lupine (Lupinus albus L.) collected from two zones (West Gojjam and Awi) of Amhara region and one zone (Metekel) of Benishangul - Gumuz regional state of Ethiopia were studied using inter simple sequence repeat (ISSR) markers in an attempt to assess the genetic diversity. Four ISSR primers of which three were dinucleotide repeats and one, a penta nucleotide repeat amplified a total of 39 clear and reproducible bands. Both unweighted pair- group method with arithmetic average (UPGMA) phenograms and a neighbor joining (NJ) trees were constructed for the individuals and populations using Jaccard’s similarity coefficient. The dendrogram clearly indicated four distinct groups/populations based on the area of origin. The principal coordinates (PCO) analysis also recovered UPGMA and neighbor joining tree groups, although Amhara region white lupine were intermixed with each other. The genetic diversity among white lupine population considered in the present study indicated that Merawi was the highest (0.223) followed by Addis Kidam, Sekela and Wembera with genetic diversity of 0.198, 0.189 and 0.167, respectively. Generally, Amhara region white lupine (0.203) population shows higher genetic diversity than white lupine population of B-Gumuz region (0.167). Analysis of molecular variance (AMOVA) in both grouping and without grouping revealed larger genetic diversity within the populations (74.6%) than among populations (25.4%). Shannon’s diversity index also confirmed the existence of higher genetic diversity in Amhara region lupine populations than in Benishangul-Gumuz. Furthermore AMOVA demonstrated highly significant (P = 0.00) genetic differences among populations within groups, among groups and within populations. Of the total variation, 64.64% was attributable to within populations, 27.23% to among groups and the least, 8.13% to among populations within groups. Generally, on the basis of samples of 39 bands in the four populations, ISSR was able to reveal moderate to high levels of genetic diversity within and among Ethiopian white lupine population.Keywords: Amhara, Benishangul - Gumuz, Ethiopia, genetic diversity, ISSR, white lupine.Abbreviation: ISSR, Inter simple sequence repeats; UPGMA, unweighted pair- group method with arithmetic average; NJ, neighbor joining; PCO, principal coordinates; AMOVA, analysis of molecular variance; RAPD, random amplified polymorphic DNA; AFLP, amplified fragment length polymorphism