Agriculture plays a vital role in African countries, driving economic growth, employment, and non-agricultural sector improvements. However, persistent food insecurity and poverty among smallholder ...families raise concerns. Land fragmentation compounds these issues, limiting agricultural productivity and pushing farmers towards off-farm activities, despite Africa's potential agricultural markets.
The study's focus is Donomadé, a remote village in southern Togo. This study pursues a dual objective. Firstly, it investigates how household characteristics, including family size and resource availability, influence farmers' resource management decisions. Secondly, the research employs serious games to comprehend farmers' livelihood strategy choices within constrained real-world-like conditions.
The iterative and participatory Companion Modelling (ComMod) approach was utilized for the co-design and co-development of a serious game. This involved close collaboration with a local research team from the University of Lomé, a local NGO, and Donomadé village farmers. Various farming systems were characterized, and collective insights into Donomadé's agricultural dynamics were gathered through surveys, interviews, and workshops.
Regardless of their in-game roles, farmers prioritize fulfilling basic family needs, such as food security and education instead of investing in agriculture. The study underscores the significance of household composition and resource availability when designing technology interventions or support mechanisms for farmers. Aligning interventions with farmers' overarching goals and challenges can enhance technology adoption. Furthermore, addressing food security remains crucial for sustainable development, as it not only improves human welfare and alleviates hunger but also forms the foundation for comprehensive solutions in the face of climate change, resource constraints, and population growth.
This research highlights that heavy investment in agriculture is not the priority for many farmers in southern Togo, despite it being their main source of sustenance and income. Addressing immediate family needs, especially food security, education, and housing, takes precedence over long-term agricultural investments. Given the persistent challenge of food security amidst global uncertainties, addressing these priorities is paramount to stimulate more significant interest in agricultural investment.
Display omitted
•In-game household structure has an impact on the decisions players make.•Regardless of their household structure, players prioritize fulfilling their basic needs before any other investments.•In the context of food insecurity, long-term investment in agricultural innovation is not a priority for farmers.
How do arts convey the existence of potent knowledge without revealing details of that knowledge? In Seeing the Unseen, art historian Susan Elizabeth Gagliardi examines tensions between the seen and ...unseen that makers, patrons, and audiences of arts in western West Africa negotiate through objects, assemblages, and performances. Gagliardi examines how ambiguity anchors design of the arts, and she shows that attempts to determine exact meanings miss the point. Specialists across western West Africa construct assemblages, installations, and buildings that hint at the possibility of revelation, but full disclosure remains unattainable. Specific activities and contexts integral to the design and use of the works often leave no visible trace. Through attention to many ways of seeing and knowing, Seeing the Unseen opens new possibilities for the study of so-called historical or classical arts of Africa grounded in the specificity of individual works, their making, and their reception. It also prompts us to reflect on how we know and what it means to know in any context.
In this work we analyze wind speed and solar irradiation data of high spatial and temporal res-olution for an extended area of north-western Africa including the Mediterranean Sea. We ex-ploit the ...ERA5 data bank compiled and maintained by the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecast (ECMWF). One of the new products they provide is horizontal wind speed components at a height of 100 m (modern wind turbines have a hub height between 80 and 120 m). We demonstrate that the desert area is an optimal location for wind- and solar electricity production for two peculiar aspects. Firstly, the wind speeds at 100 m over the Sahara are al-most as large as wind speeds over the open sea. Wind speed differences between the standard 10 m altitude and 100 m level are considerably larger over the desert area than over the sea. Secondly, there are utilizable anti-correlations between local wind speeds at 100 m and surface solar radiations over the Sahara. As far as we know, such anti-correlations over our target area are not considered until very recently as an exploitable source of combined solar-wind electricity production. We provide a theoretically optimum combination of the two resources in a simple model framework. The result is that resource combinations between 60-40% and 70-30% wind-solar electricity aggregation (depending on the geographic location) provide and optimally smooth output with a minimal loss of total production achieved by either pure wind or pure photo-voltaic generation.
•Wind speeds at 100 m height over the Sahara are as strong as over open sea.•Spatial correlation lengths for the wind fields are extremely large.•Saharan wind regularly intensifies during nighttime periods, in each season.•Anti-correlations between integrated solar and wind resources improve the smoothness.•The total output power loss at an optimal resource combination is low.
•There are at least 137 plants from 53 families used in traditional oral health care in West Africa.•Less than 50 % of the plants have been tested for their antimicrobial activities against oral ...pathogens.•Candida albicans, fusobacterium nucleatum, porphyromonas gingivalis, and streptococcus mutans are the most tested pathogens for antimicrobial studies.•Very few studies have examined the antimicrobial activities of isolated phytochemicals.
The physiological condition of the oral cavity makes it a perfect place for microbial growth. Therefore, diseases associated with the oral cavity affect approximately half of the world's population, making them some of the most common diseases. In Africa, the use of medicinal plants for oral health is a longstanding tradition because of their accessibility and affordability. This study reviews the published literature on the plants used for treating oral diseases in West Africa and the scientific studies carried out on the plants regarding the validation of their ethnobotanical uses. The information used in this review was retrieved from various published articles downloaded from databases and journal websites. A total of 137 plant species from 53 families are presented in this review. The families Fabaceae (22), Asteraceae (8), Anarcadiaceae (6), Euphorbiaceae (6), Combretaceae (5), Myrtaceae (5), Rubiaceae (5), Apocynaceae (4), and Meliaceae (4) account for 47 % of the plants recorded in this review. Approximately 50 % of the plant species are trees; leaves are the most commonly used plant part, and decoction is the most preferred preparation method. Of the 137 plants, only 41 have been examined for their antimicrobial activities against oral pathogens, notably Candida albicans, Fusobacterium nucleatum, Porphyromonas gingivalis, and Streptococcus mutans. Based on this, some of the most active plants with low MIC include Allium cepa, Argemone mexicana, Ricinus communis, and Syzygium aromaticum. A few studies have also tested the activities of isolated phytochemicals from some plants and evidence of beneficial synergism between two or three plants on oral infections. The conservation statuses of most of the species implicated in this review are least concerned (66); 5 species are vulnerable,3 species are nearly threatened, and one species is endangered. This review revealed the need to intensify efforts on the ethnobotanical and ethnopharmacological studies of plants used to treat various oral diseases.
•Past disturbances affect negatively the density and diversity of soil seed bank (SSB) in West African semi-deciduous forests.•On vertisols and degraded areas, the expected pattern of SSB abundance ...decreasing with depth is not fulfilled.•Similarity between soil seed bank and surrounding vegetation is low.•Timber tree taxa are rare in the seed banks.
The soil seed bank (SSB) in forests is a key indicator of their resilience after disturbances. Despite the growing interest in describing patterns of SSB and understanding potential processes underpinning those patterns, we still know little about SSB patterns and drivers in semi-deciduous tropical forests. Using the regeneration emergence method, we assessed the patterns of SSB (i) across four vegetation types with variable intensity of past human disturbances: typical dense forest - degraded dense forest - young preforest fallow - old preforest fallow, and (ii) in relationships to soil depth (0–5 cm, 5–10 cm, 10–15 cm, 15–20 cm) in a protected tropical semi-deciduous dense forest in Benin, West-Africa. The standing vegetation (adults and regeneration) data and soil samples were collected using a systematic sampling of 60 plots of 10 m × 10 m in the four vegetation types. Herbaceous plants dominated (67% − 78%) the SSB. From the SSB, five tree species emerged: Ceiba pentandra (L.) Gaertn., Dialium guineense Willd., Ficus sur Forssk., Leucaena leucocephala (Lam.) De Wit, and Lonchocarpus sericeus (Poir.) Kunth. Regarding tree species, the total densities of germinated seeds (seeds.m−2) were higher in typical dense forest (28.00 ± 7.22) and young preforest fallow (16.67 ± 7.07) than in old preforest fallow (10.00 ± 6.75) and degraded dense forest (8.89 ± 3.81). When only tree species were considered, the SSB was more diverse and dense in typical dense forest than in other vegetation types suggesting negative effect of past human disturbances on SSB. The similarity of the species composition between the SSB and the surrounding vegetation was low (Jaccard's similarity index ranged from 0 to 17.64%, indicating that the majority of tree species in the surrounding vegetation were absent in the SSB. This study highlighted a need of planting effort of native tree species to restore degraded areas.
Space, beyond standard urban/rural divisions, plays a leading role in the diffusion of educational access. In this paper, using geo-localisation and Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) we analyse ...spatial inequality in educational access (primary, lower secondary and upper secondary levels) for 13,000 communities from 22 countries in the Eastern and Western African regions. We find that: (i) space matters for educational access after accounting for communities’ contextual backgrounds in spatial econometric models, (ii) the extent of spatial inequality in educational access is higher in countries with lower levels of women’s empowerment, and (iii) spatial educational inequality operate more powerfully in marginalised communities. Educational policies aimed at boosting educational access should consider space-based interventions, looking beyond the traditional rural-urban or regional boundaries.
•Study spatial educational inequality (SEI) on educational access for 13,000 communities.•Assess association of SEI with lack of womenŠs empowerment in 22 African countries.•Find that space matters for educational access net of communitiesŠ contextual backgrounds.•SEI operates more powerfully in marginalised communities.•Inequalities in proximal communities have an impact on inequalities in nearby communities.
Resumo: Paulo Fernando de Moraes Farias é historiador brasileiro com renomado trabalho desenvolvido no Centre of West African Studies, da Universidade de Birmingham. Sua longa trajetória de ...residência e pesquisa no Reino Unido se deu após anos decisivos, em que viveu em diferentes países da África Ocidental. Perseguido politicamente pela ditadura civil-militar brasileira instaurada em 1964, Farias deixou o Centro de Estudos Afro-orientais (Ceao) da Universidade Federal da Bahia (UFBA) e vinculou-se sucessivamente a diferentes instituições acadêmicas em Gana, no Senegal e na Nigéria para desenvolver pesquisa no emergente campo da história africana. Neste texto, amparado em três entrevistas concedidas por Farias e em diversas correspondências depositadas em acervos do Ceao e da Fundação Pierre Verger (FPV), discutimos os dilemas, as descobertas e os diálogos do jovem historiador em seu exílio africano entre 1964 e 1969.
Western Africa is vulnerable to arboviral disease transmission, having recently experienced major outbreaks of chikungunya, dengue, yellow fever and Zika. However, there have been relatively few ...studies on the natural history of the two major human arbovirus vectors in this region, Aedes aegypti and Ae. albopictus, potentially limiting the implementation of effective vector control. We systematically searched for and reviewed relevant studies on the behaviour and ecology of Ae. aegypti and Ae. albopictus in Western Africa, published over the last 40 years. We identified 73 relevant studies, over half of which were conducted in Nigeria, Senegal, or Côte dʼIvoire. Most studies investigated the ecology of Ae. aegypti and Ae. albopictus, exploring the impact of seasonality and land cover on mosquito populations and identifying aquatic habitats. This review highlights the adaptation of Ae. albopictus to urban environments and its invasive potential, and the year-round maintenance of Ae. aegypti populations in water storage containers. However, important gaps were identified in the literature on the behaviour of both species, particularly Ae. albopictus. In Western Africa, Ae. aegypti and Ae. albopictus appear to be mainly anthropophilic and to bite predominantly during the day, but further research is needed to confirm this to inform planning of effective vector control strategies. We discuss the public health implications of these findings and comment on the suitability of existing and novel options for control in Western Africa.
Display omitted
•A comprehensive review on the behaviour and ecology of Aedes aegypti and Ae. albopictus in Western Africa.•Provides an update on insecticide resistance, indicating emerging resistance to organophosphates in Ae. aegypti.•Assesses suitability of existing and novel tools for controlling Ae. aegypti and Ae. albopictus in the region.•Highlights future directions for research, e.g. randomised controlled trials of tools with epidemiological outcomes.•Ae. aegypti and Ae. albopictus appear to be predominantly anthropophilic in Western Africa.
Elisabeth Huber untersucht in ihrer Studie die Möglichkeiten umweltgerechten Handelns der ärmeren städtischen Bevölkerungsschichten im urbanen Raum Westafrikas. Dazu analysiert sie die Praktiken der ...Abfall- und Abwasserentsorgung in Bamako (Mali) und Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso) unter den dafür relevanten ökonomischen, sozialen und kulturellen Bedingungen. Neben der Erörterung von Armut anhand monetärer Aspekte, fehlender Verwirklichungschancen sowie familiärer und nachbarschaftlicher Solidaritätsstrategien stellt sie die Frage nach dem Zusammenhang von Umweltbewusstsein, Umweltverschmutzung, Umweltschutz, Wohn- und Lebensbedingungen, Infrastruktur und dem »Recht auf Stadt«.
PDF
