Search results for: Fitsum Mardu

Authors: Getachew Belay, Getachew Kahsu, Brhane Berhe, Kebede Tesfay, Fitsum Mardu, Nigus Shishay, Hadush Negash, Aster Tsegaye

Abstract:

Background: Malaria kills million people around the world, and it is still a serious public health problem in Ethiopia. Over the past years, the disease has been consistently reported as leading cause of outpatient visits, hospitalization and death in health facilities across the country. This study assessed malaria trend in Humera Town Kahsay Abera Hospital Tigrai region, Northern Ethiopia. Method: A Health facility retrospective cross sectional study was conducted in Kahsay Abera General Hospital from January 2011 to December 2019. Data of Malaria cases were reviewed from Health Management Information System with the help of experts in the office. The nine year data were extracted and analyzed using Excel by excluding those which lack demographic data. Result: A total of 36,604 smear positive malaria cases were confirmed in last nine years in the study area. Plasmodim falcifarum was the most prevalent reported species. Higher number of malaria cases were reported during October season.Males were more infected by the disese (63.1%) than females and males aged 15 years and above were the most iffected ones. The percentage proportion of P.falcifarum and P.vivax were 61.6% to 38.4%, respectively. There was a decreasing trend over the nine years following the peak in 2013. Conclusion: Malaria smear positivity, with highest cases being recorded in October, was declined over the nine years after peaking in 2013. Males aged 15 years and above were more affected, and P falciparum was the predominat species. Strengtheing the prevention and control activities is warranted in the study area.

Keywords: trend, malaria, kahsay abera general hospital, tigray, ethiopia

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Authors: Sham Kidane, Fitsum Gaim, Ibrahim Abdella, Sirak Asmerom, Yoel Ghebrihiwot, Simon Mulugeta, Natnael Ambassager

Abstract:

The lack of annotated datasets is a bottleneck to the progress of NLP in low-resourced languages. The work presented here consists of large-scale annotated datasets and models for the named entity recognition (NER) system for the Tigrinya language. Our manually constructed corpus comprises over 340K words tagged for NER, with over 118K of the tokens also having parts-of-speech (POS) tags, annotated with 12 distinct classes of entities, represented using several types of tagging schemes. We conducted extensive experiments covering convolutional neural networks and transformer models; the highest performance achieved is 88.8% weighted F1-score. These results are especially noteworthy given the unique challenges posed by Tigrinya’s distinct grammatical structure and complex word morphologies. The system can be an essential building block for the advancement of NLP systems in Tigrinya and other related low-resourced languages and serve as a bridge for cross-referencing against higher-resourced languages.

Keywords: Tigrinya NER corpus, TiBERT, TiRoBERTa, BiLSTM-CRF

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Authors: Shamm Kidane, Ibrahim Abdella, Fitsum Gaim, Simon Mulugeta, Sirak Asmerom, Natnael Ambasager, Yoel Ghebrihiwot

Abstract:

The call for natural language processing (NLP) systems for low-resource languages has become more apparent than ever in the past few years, with the arduous challenges still present in preparing such systems. This paper presents an improved dataset version of the Nagaoka Tigrinya Corpus for Parts-of-Speech (POS) classification system in the Tigrinya language. The size of the initial Nagaoka dataset was incremented, totaling the new tagged corpus to 118K tokens, which comprised the 12 basic POS annotations used previously. The additional content was also annotated manually in a stringent manner, followed similar rules to the former dataset and was formatted in CONLL format. The system made use of the novel approach in NLP tasks and use of the monolingually pre-trained TiELECTRA, TiBERT and TiRoBERTa transformer models. The highest achieved score is an impressive weighted F1-score of 94.2%, which surpassed the previous systems by a significant measure. The system will prove useful in the progress of NLP-related tasks for Tigrinya and similarly related low-resource languages with room for cross-referencing higher-resource languages.

Keywords: Tigrinya POS corpus, TiBERT, TiRoBERTa, conditional random fields

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Authors: Endalew Jibat, Feyera Senbeta, Tesfaye Zeleke, Fitsum Hagos

Abstract:

Institutions can play a key role in coordinating how natural resources are effectively used without over-exploitation. Institutions are the laws, policies, and organizational arrangements that permit, forbid or regulate human action. The aim of this study was to look into the roles of formal and informal institutions, as well as their interactions, in water resource governance in Ethiopia's Central Rift Valley (CRV), where water scarcity is a concern. Key informant interviews, group discussions, in depth-interview, and secondary data sources were used to generate relevant data. The study revealed that formal and informal institutions were involved in water resource governance in the study area. However, the influence of informal institutions on formal institutions or vice versa is trivial to change the action of water users. Lack of clear roles and responsibilities of actors, weak capacity and lack of meaningful decentralization and participation of key actors in policy development, lack of synergy and incongruence between formal and informal institutions, and absence of enforcement mechanisms including incentives are attributed to inefficient use of water resources in the CRV. Enhancing the interplay of formal and informal institutions in the water resource policy development and meaningful decentralization and key stakeholders' engagement is recommended for sustainable water use.

Keywords: institutions, governance, institutional interplay, water users

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Authors: Justin D. Olmanson, Fitsum Abebe, Valerie Jones, Eric Kyle, Xianquan Liu, Katherine Robbins, Guieswende Rouamba

Abstract:

The history of education technology--and designing, adapting, and adopting technologies for use in educational spaces--is nuanced, complex, and dynamic. Yet, despite a range of continually emerging technologies, the design and development process often yields results that appear quite similar in terms of affordances and interactions. Through this study we (1) verify the extent to which designs have been constrained, (2) consider what might account for it, and (3) offer a way forward in terms of how we might identify and strategically sidestep these influences--thereby increasing the diversity of our designs with a given technology or within a particular learning domain. We begin our inquiry from the perspective that a host of co-influencing elements, fields, and meta narratives converge on the education technology design process to exert a tangible, often homogenizing effect on the resultant designs. We identify several elements that influence design in often implicit or unquestioned ways (e.g. curriculum, learning theory, economics, learning context, pedagogy), we describe our methodology for identifying the elemental positionality embedded in a design, we direct our analysis to a particular subset of technologies in the field of literacy, and unpack our findings. Our early analysis suggests that the majority of education technologies designed for use/used in US public schools are heavily influenced by a handful of mainstream theories and meta narratives. These findings have implications for how we approach the education technology design process--which we use to suggest alternative methods for designing/ developing with emerging technologies. Our analytical process and re conceptualized design process hold the potential to diversify the ways emerging and established technologies get incorporated into our designs.

Keywords: curriculum, design, innovation, meta narratives

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Authors: Endalew Jibat, Feyera Senbeta, Tesfaye Zeleke, Fitsum Hagos

Abstract:

Water governance considers multi-sector participation beyond the state; and for sustainable use of water resources, appropriate laws, policies, regulations, and institutions needs to be developed and put in place. Water policy, a critical and integral instrument of water governance, guided water use schemes and ensures equitable water distribution among users. The Ethiopian Central Rift Valley (CRV) is wealthy of water resources, but these water resources are currently under severe strain owing to an imbalance in human-water interactions. The main aim of the study was to examine the state of water resources governance in the CRV of Ethiopia, and the impact of the Ethiopian Water Resources Management Policy on water governance. Key informant interviews (KII), focused group discussions, and document reviews were used to gather data for the study. The NVivo 11 program was used to organize, code, and analyze the data. The results revealed that water resources governance practices such as water allocation and apportionment, comprehensive and integrated water management plans, water resources protection, and conservation activities were rarely implemented. Water resources management policy mechanisms were not fully put in place. Lack of coherence in water policy implementation, absence of clear roles and responsibilities of stakeholders, absence of transparency and accountability in irrigation water service delivery, and lack of meaningful participation of key actors in water governance decision-making were the primary shortcomings observed. Factors such as over-abstraction, deterioration of buffer zone, and chemical erosion from surrounding farming have contributed to the reduction in water volume and quality in the CRV. These challenges have influenced aquatic ecosystem services and threaten the livelihoods of the surrounding communities. Hence, reforms relating to policy coherence and enforcement, stakeholder involvement, water distribution strategies, and the application of water governance principles must be given more emphasis.

Keywords: water resources, irrigation, governance, water allocation, governance principles, stakeholders engagement, central rift valley

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Authors: Hussien Ali, Mesfin Menza, Fitsum Hagos, Amare Haileslassie

Abstract:

Climate change has perverse effects on agricultural productivity and natural resource base, negatively affecting the well-being of the households and communities. The government and NGOs promote climate smart agricultural (CSA) practices to help farmers adapt to and mitigate the negative effects of climate change. This study aims to identify widely available CSA practices and examine their impacts on food security and multi-dimensional poverty of rural farm households in the Central Rift Valley, Ethiopia. Using three-stage proportional to size sampling procedure, the study randomly selected 278 households from two kebeles from four districts each. A cross-sectional data of 2020/21 cropping season was collected using structured and pretested survey questionnaire. Food consumption score, dietary diversity score, food insecurity experience scale, and multidimensional poverty index were calculated to measure households’ welfare indicators. Multinomial endogenous switching regression model was used to assess average treatment effects of CSA on these outcome indicators on adopter and non-adopter households. The results indicate that the widely adopted CSA practices in the area are conservation agriculture, soil fertility management, crop diversification, and small-scale irrigation. Adopter households have, on average, statistically higher food consumption score, dietary diversity score and lower food insecurity access scale than non-adopters. Moreover, adopter households, on average, have lower deprivation score in multidimensional poverty compared to non-adopter households. Up scaling the adoption of CSA practices through the improvement of households’ implementation capacity and better information, technical advice, and innovative financing mechanisms is advised. Up scaling CSA practices can further promote achieving global goals such as SDG 1, SDG 2, and SDG 13 targets, aimed to end poverty and hunger and mitigate the adverse impacts of climate change, respectively.

Keywords: climate-smart agriculture, food security, multidimensional poverty, upscaling CSA, Ethiopia

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