Access to forest resources: women's rights to Parkia biglobosa in three villages in Central-West Burkina Faso

Parkia biglobosa, a NTFP tree species commonly known as "néré" is particularly important in the diet of rural and urban populations in the Sudano-Sahelian zone. The seeds are processed into a highly nutritious sauce, called "soumbala", combined with cereal dishes. While néré is very popular, its occurrence is declining because of various threats hindering its regeneration. In a condition of increasing scarcity of néré and increasing demand, changes in use and access rights, depending on the social status of harvesters, are taking place. Harvesting is an activity carried out by women. Although they depend on NTFP in general, and on néré in particular, to procure food for the household and for income generation, they have no secure access to tree resources. This study focused on the analysis of the dynamics of women's access rights and control over néré in three villages in Central-West Burkina Faso, inhabited by three ethnic groups (Nouni, Mossi and Fulani) with specific and differentiated modes of access to the land. The approach adopted enabled to individually follow in the field each woman involved in the study and observe tree-specific conditions of access. Individual access rights of 180 women to 400 exploited trees were investigated. The findings indicate a different access for land and for trees. While access to trees and harvesting rights of women are stable and almost uniform in the land occupied by forest, within the boundaries of the household or within the territory attributed to a particular lineage, women are affected by gains or losses of rights to use néré that are highly dependent on changes in land tenure. These changes are associated with the transfer of land rights from a person to another through the processes of inheritance, renting, lending and sale. In addition, these access rights to néré are considerably differentiated based on a hierarchical system defined by ethnicity and position in the household. Understanding the differentiated tree tenure in a multi ethnical context of Burkina Faso will help to develop sustainable and equitable protection measures and policies, based on local management practices

Access right to food tree species: the case of women access to nere (Parkia biglobosa) in Central-West Burkina Faso

This paper first presents a clustering of women based on the characterization of their distinct access rights to néré. Secondly, the types of access rights are characterized also in spatial terms, based on the type of land use where the women harvesting is exercised

Common fixed point theorems for single and set-valued maps satisfying a strict contractive condition

Some new common fixed point theorems for weakly compatible single and set-valued mappings under strict contractive conditions are obtained. Our results extend, improve and complement the result of Fisher [3] and the recent one due to Ahmed [2] and others

Common fixed point theorems for pairs of single and multivalued D-maps satisfying an integral type

This contribution is a continuation of [1, 3, 14]. The concept of subcom- patibility between single maps and between single and multivalued maps is used as a tool for proving existence and uniqueness of common fixed points on complete metric and symmetric spaces. Extensions of known results, in particularly results given by Djoudi and Aliouche, Elamrani and Mehdaoui, Pathak et al. are thereby obtained

Direct contributions of dry forests to nutrition: a review

Globally, micronutrient deficiencies are more prevalent than calorie and protein deficiencies. In order to address global micronutrient deficiencies, increasing attention is being paid to the nutritional quality of people’s diets. While conventional agriculture is key for ensuring adequate calories, dietary quality depends on the consumption of a diverse range of micronutrient rich foods. Many wild foods are rich in micronutrients, particularly fruits, vegetables, and animal source food. As a result there has been increasing interest in the value of wild foods to meeting nutritional requirements. We review literature on the consumption of wild foods in dry forest areas to assess the current state of knowledge as to how dry forests may contribute to nutrition. We focus on papers that quantify consumption of wild forest foods. Although there is a great deal of literature that lends weight to the notion that dry forests are important for food security and nutrition, we find surprisingly little evidence of direct contributions to diets. Of 2514 articles identified by our search, only four quantify the consumption of wild foods from dry forests, and only one of these puts this consumption in the context of the entire diet. There is a need for research on the nutritional importance of dry forest foods which combines methodologies from nutrition science with an understanding and appreciation of the ecological, social, cultural and economic context

Towards more inclusive community landscape governance:Drivers and assessment indicators in northern Ghana

Community-based approaches to landscape governance are considered more legitimate, equitable, and inclusive ways to manage natural resources and more effective in achieving conservation and livelihood goals than centralised and top-down approaches. In Ghana, the Wildlife Division of the Forestry Commission devolved decision-making authority over natural resources through the Community Resource Management Area (CREMA) governance system. While there is a growing body of literature on the CREMA governance model, few studies have examined the inclusiveness of its decision-making processes. This study aims to fill this gap by identifying the drivers that hinder or foster the inclusiveness of community governance in the Western Wildlife Corridor of northern Ghana and developing a set of inclusivity assessment indicators. Based on data collected through key informant interviews, focus group discussions, and observations, we found that several stakeholder groups remain at the margins of the CREMA governance system and feel excluded, particularly Fulani herders, women, and youth. Based on our findings and the literature, we present a set of assessment indicators for inclusive CREMA governance. However, these indicators are unlikely to be fully met because of persisting socio-cultural barriers and power asymmetries. We argue that measures such as capacity building, empowering marginalised social groups, promoting their participation in decision-making, and a bottom-up approach towards creating CREMAs are needed to improve the inclusiveness of CREMA governance. Beyond the CREMAs, the inclusivity indicators developed in this study have broad applicability to environmental and landscape governance

Do About Half the Top Quarks at FNAL Come From Gluino Decays?

We argue that it is possible to make a consistent picture of FNAL data including the production and decay of gluinos and squarks. The additional cross section is several pb, about the size of that for Standard Model (SM) top quark pair production. If the stop squark mass is small enough, about half of the top quarks decay to stop squarks, and the loss of SM top quark pair production rate is compensated by the supersymmetric processes. This behavior is consistent with the reported top quark decay rates in various modes and other aspects of the data, and suggests several other possible decay signatures. This picture can be tested easily with more data, perhaps even with the data in hand, and demonstrates the potential power of a hadron collider to determine supersymmetric parameters. It also has implications for the top mass measurement and the interpretation of the LEP $R_b$ excess.Comment: 18 pages, including 4 Postscript figures, uses epsf.tex, also available at http://www.hep.anl.gov/theory/mrenna