ghanaopendata/ghanaian-research-english huggingface dataset:
Sorghum grain yield and nutrient dynamics under varying rates of fertilizer application in the Sub-Sudanian Zone of Burkina Faso

Soil fertility depletion is known as the most important limitation to food security in Burkina Faso. Low yield of sorghum is constrained by inadequate supply of fertilizers and there is the need to establish optimum rates for sustainable use by farmers. This study is a short-term experiment conducted during the 2014 cropping season on a Luvisol in the sub-sudanian zone of Burkina Faso and was laid in a split-plot, arranged in a randomized complete block design with three replications. Cattle manure (CM) at two rates (0 t ha-1 and 5 t ha-1) constituted the main plot whilst mineral fertilizer (kg ha-1) at eleven rates (0N-0P-0K, 40N-0P-0K, 60N-0P-0K, 40N-15P-0K, 60N-15P-0K, 60N-7.5P-0K, 60N-22.5P-0K, 60N-15P-10K, 60N-15P-20K, 60N-15P-30K and 90N-15P-20K-15S-2.5Zn-10Mg-0.5B) constituted the sub-plots. Analysis of variance showed that sorghum grain N, P and K uptake were significantly (P < 0.05) influenced by the application of mineral fertilizer and cattle manure while their interaction did not significantly affect (P > 0.05) these parameters. Sorghum straw N, P and K uptake were significantly influenced (P < 0.05) by cattle manure and mineral fertilizer rates applied as well as their interaction except the effect of manure on straw K uptake. Soil nutrient contents during plant growth decreased due to the larger quantities of nutrients exported by plant uptake. The highest grain yield response was observed under sole application of 60 kg N ha-1 and 22.5 kg P ha-1. However, the yield obtained under these treatments was not significantly different from the grain yield observed under the applications of 40 kg N ha-1 and 15 kg P ha-1. Since lower N and P rates gave similar grain yield as the reference plot (90N-15P-20K-15S-2.5Zn-10Mg-0.5B), sole application of 60 kg N ha-1 and 22.5 kg P ha-1 can be considered as appropriate rate for optimum grain yield production. The interaction effect of cattle manure and mineral fertilizer did not xiii significantly (P > 0.05) increase sorghum grain yield. The highest grain yield obtained in this case, was with the interaction between 5 t of cattle manure ha-1, 60 kg N ha-1 and 7.5 kg P ha-1 mineral fertilizer rates applied. No significant difference (P > 0.05) in sorghum grain yield was obtained above this fertilizer rate which can undoubtedly be suggested as the optimum rate. The Value Cost Ratio (VCR) of 2.01 and 2.23 obtained respectively under 60N-22.5P-0K and the interaction of cattle manure with 60N-7.5P-0K at the beginning of the wet season slightly exceeded the critical value of 2 required to motivate farmers to apply mineral fertilizer. Thus, fertilizer requirement for sustainable sorghum grain production at the study area in Burkina Faso is 5 t ha-1 of cattle manure combined with 60 kg N ha-1 and 7.5 kg P ha- 1.

Source: KNUST
Sorption of Inorganic Mercury on Soils from Ankobra Basin in the South - Western Part of Ghana

Understanding the adsorption of mercury on soil from aqueous solution is necessary for tracing the fate of mercury in the environment. The fate of mercury in the soil is important not only to assess surface and groundwater quality, but also to understand mercury ﬂuxes at the soil/air and water/air interfaces. The most important chemical retention mechanisms are sorption processes and precipitation. This study was undertaken to predict the fate of mercury emitted from artisanal gold mining activities within the Ankobra basin. Total mercury (THg) concentrations were determined in soils close to River Ankobra and its major tributaries in the south-western part of Ghana by Cold Vapour Atomic Absorption Spectrophotometry. Some soil characteristic such as pH, particle size distribution and organic matter were also determined. THg content of the soils ranged from 0.051µg/g to 0.366µg/g with an average of 0.15µg/g, which were below the permissible level of THg for soils (200µg/g) set by US EPA. THg correlated positively (r = 0.57) with the organic matter content of the soil. This indicates increasing Hg concentration with increasing organic matter content. Sorption of Hg (II) onto seven (7) different soils from the A-horizon indicated that the soils had an L - type isotherm and the distribution coefficient (Kd) ranged from 41.4 µg/g to 182.2 µg/g. The Freundlich model showed a better fit followed by Langmuir model and Linear model because most of the regression coefficients were close to one. The best fitness of Freundlich model to the other models could be attributed to the heterogeneous surface energies and exponential distribution of active sites which are characteristic of such soils. All the soils had adsorption intensity (n) lower than one, indicating that the soils could be good sorbents for Hg (II). This suggests that the fate of Hg and its availability in soil for runoff and leaching could be low for soils with such characteristics.

Source: KNUST
Source separation, characterization and recycling potential of household solid waste: A case study of Kumasi, Ghana.

A person stops generating waste only when he or she is in a state to be disposed of as waste (Adogame, 2009). As the generation of solid waste in Kumasi increases continuously with economic growth, the importance of recycling and other waste recovery options become more apparent in order to prolong the lifespan of the only existing landfill. This study was undertaken to assess the willingness of households in low and middle income communities in Kumasi to separate household waste at source as well as the set out rate and efficiency at which the households can separate the waste into the desired categories in order to evaluate the potential of households to sort out uncontaminated solid waste for waste recovery options including recycling and composting. Parameters such as waste generation (kg/capita/day), waste composition and bulk density of solid waste were also considered. The recorded data was modelled to ascertain the possibility of predicting the per capita generation of waste using the household size as the independent variable. Households willing to source separate waste were given differently coloured bags and their solid wastes collected, sorted into components with the weight and volume measured. The separation efficiencies were taken into account. Over 70% of respondents in both groups were willing to separate waste at source. The solid waste generation rates were 0.407kg/capita/day and 0.578kg/capita/day for low and middle income groups respectively. The findings show that income levels influence solid waste generation as a result of differences in consumption patterns. The wastes were sorted into six fractions of which the highest constituent was organic, 62% on average. Separation efficiencies were highest in the organic category (over 70%), followed by other wastes category (over 69%), and the paper and plastics category (over 60%).The findings show a highly efficient source separation programme significantly enhances the recycling potential of recyclables in the waste stream whiles the high organic separation efficiencies could help recover majority of the organic waste in the waste stream for composting purposes. Regression analysis of modelled data showed a significant positive relationship between the per capita generation of solid waste and the household size. The results indicate that household size could be an important tool to predict the per capita generation of solid waste, in addition to other social, cultural and economic parameters.

Source: KNUST
Sources of Finance For SMEs in Kumasi

The SMEs in Ghana and for that matter, Kumasi, operate in a developing market and this study was set to investigate how SMEs obtain their finance impacts on their activities. There are different ways of Financing SME’s. The availability and accessibility of these sources depend on various factors. The study highlights and examines the various sources of finance. It also looks at the problems SMEs encounter before they could access such facilities and also suggest possible recommendations on how alternative financing can be made. In total 50 respondents responded to the questionnaire, the study indicated that financing available like self financing, bank loans, savings and loans and credit schemes have impact the SMEs activities. The SMEs interviewed were of the view that their ability to obtain fiancé easily for many source is contingent on the trustworthiness of the various SMEs to disclose correct information and also for the financiers to do due diligence before releasing any form of finance to SMEs. Recommendation was advanced in areas of credit scoring, factoring, micro-finance and venture capital.

Source: KNUST
Sources of capital for entrepreneurial development in Ghana

Introduction : Business venture of any form such as trading, services or manufacturing employs various resources in different quantities to achieve its objectives. These resources are generally made up of land, labour and capital. Whilst some of these, namely land and labour, may be seen to be relatively stable in their application to any production, the same cannot be said of capital resource, which is of more volatile nature and therefore calls for efficient planning in its generation and management. Capital in the normal business language, comprises the physical money and all forms of credit that are needed to either start up a new business or sustain the growth of an existing enterprise. Perhaps one may further look at capital to include all the physical assets of a business as well as the intangible assets such as the firm’s securities, goodwill, patent rights and other form of claims to wealth held by the firm.’ Capital used for business enterprise can also be classified according to the length of period for which they will be utilised. Firms employ the use of assets which range from premise, equipment, and others which are also used over and over for a long period in the manufacture of products or provision of services. This form of capital is known as long-term capital. Secondly, certain business operations may require funds not for a period as long as mentioned above. These funds would usually be needed to meet expenditures which may not stretch beyond a period of ten years. Capital of this nature is termed medium-term capital.2 The last category of capital is referred to as short-term capital, and is mostly used to meet expenditures covering a period of up to about two years3, particularly to meet the cost of operating the enterprise and other recurrent expenditure, creating a form of revolving fund. For the purpose of this study, the scope of capital would exclude the forms such as goodwill and patent rights and concentrate on money, forms of credit and the physical assets of equipment and machinery. The rest of the chapters will take turns to discuss the various sources that an entrepreneur could obtain his needed funds to meet his business requirements.

Source: KNUST
Sources, Challenges and Sustainability of Internally Generated Fund at University of Education, Winneba

Descriptive statistics was used to analyze the data. The study revealed that residential, academic user facility fees paid by regular students and fees by sandwich students had huge impact on the revenue generation of the university. There is no doubt that the above mentioned sources of internally generated fund are the core funds areas from which the university gets its reliable and biggest revenues. Also, it came to light from the study that most of the sources of Internally Generated Fund for the university can be sustainable by constant increase of enrolment and commercialization of departmental activities like printing/ publication section and clothing service department. It was concluded that in order for the university to increase revenue from its commercialized activities, the university can come out with new marketing strategies to attract the public to buy into its commercial and other revenue generation activities. The study recommended that management of universities should put in place effective measures that would ensure that those IGF sources that contribute huge amount of revenue on the activities of the universities (sale of farm products, sale of admission forms, residential and academic facilities user fees and sandwich fees) are improved upon and efficiently managed to ensure long-term sustainability.

Source: KNUST
Spatial Analysis of Malaria Epidemiology in the Amanse West District.

Malaria has become a major global health problem. It affects 3.5-5.0 billion people worldwide with environmental factors contributing about 70-90% of the disease risk. The World Health Organization has estimated that over one million cases of Malaria are reported each year, with more than 80% of these found in Sub-Saharan Africa. The malaria situation in Ghana is typical of sub-Saharan Africa, presenting a serious health problem in Ghana. It is hyper endemic with a crude parasite rate ranging from 10 – 70% with Plasmodium falciparum dominating. Disease Risk mapping has long been effective in disease modeling, monitoring, evaluation and providing major intervention for areas at risk. The spatial dependency of the malaria risk was explored using Poisson variograms and the risk was used to create surface maps from 2004 to 2009 to identify areas at high risk. Bayesian geostatitical approach was then used to correlate the relationship between the elevation and the disease risk. Geographic Information System (GIS) was used to create the risk surfaces and overlays in the study. A buffered distances of 500m, 1000m, 1500 and 2000m was used to overlay the disease risk map with forest, rivers/streams to find out its effects with the disease prevalence. The risk map created in this study, which integrates Poisson statistical methods showed areas at risk, especially in the central portions of the district capital. It also showed an average of 20% rise yearly from 2004 to 2009. The results in the semi-variogram analysis with an average range of 2000m showed that the disease incidence was local and not global. The local nature of the disease occurrence gives credence to the fact that the covariates used which were rivers/streams, forest, temperature, rainfall and elevation had different and independent influence on the malaria prevalence. Areas which were more than 2km away from the water source (rivers/streams) recorded relatively higher cases except for some few within 1km of the Offin and Oda rivers. There was a varied effect of elevation with the disease prevalence as evidenced in the Bayesian regression model. There was a general trend of high disease incidence between 1-3 km from the forest edge. The study also showed that rainfall had an effect on the yearly disease incidence. However, there was no trend as far as the temperature over the disease prevalence was concerned.

Source: KNUST
Sources of Growth in the Ghanaian Manufacturing Sector (1965-2006)

This study examines the major determinant of manufacturing growth in Ghana, emphasizing the importance of trade. Trade therefore is put into three sections namely, exports, imports and economic liberalization. It Further considered the question as to whether the removal of trade barriers has been able to promote industrial convergence. Annual time series data covering the period 1965 to 2006 was used. The researcher applied the bounds testing approach to co-integration and error correction models, developed within an auto-regressive distributed lag (ARDL)framework, to investigate whether a long-run relationship exist. Using this approach the researcher found evidence of long-run relationship between growth and its determinants. The results indicate that economic liberalization has positive impact on growth while imports have negative impact and this result is consistence with other findings. Again, there is sufficient evidence to conclude that smaller firms are growing faster relative to large firms.

Source: KNUST
Spatial Analysis Of Poverty Incidence Rate In Ghana

The study explored spatial analyse of poverty incidence in Ghana using data obtained from GLSS 6. Poverty deals with those whose standard of living falls below a particular threshold which is referred to as the poverty line. The data include key indicators or variables such as income, expenditure, education, health, water and sanitation, assets and source of household energy use. The data was analyzed using the R software (RGui (32bit)). Poisson kriging techniques was use in estimating the spatial distribution of Poverty Incidence Rate (PIR). There was a high robustness in the Nugget to Sill Ratio. The spatial map of poverty incidence indicated high rate of poverty in the North-Western part of the study area (Upper-West region). The North-Eastern part in the study area (Upper eastern zone and Northern Volta) appears to record low poverty incidence rate. The southern part of the study area looks very patchy and smoother. These areas are, some southern portion of Brong-Ahafo region, Ashanti region, Eastern region, Greater Accra region, Central region and Western region of Ghana. The two maps (the spatial map and the location map) share similar spatial patterns with lower variance near the coastal area in the southern part of the case study. The magnitude of the Poisson kriging variance has a lower impact of the extreme rates on the semivariogram estimation, reduces the sill of the weighted semivariogram. The study recommended that, the Municipal and the districts found to be the hotspots areas should educate communities to practice subsist enc e farming. This will help supplement their home expenditure and r educ e the cost of burden in their earnings. In this regard, level of poverty will r educ e.

Source: KNUST
Spatial analysis of poverty among women in Ghana

In Ghana, although women constitute more than half of the total population, they are grossly disadvantaged in the sharing of political power, wealth, in uence, employments etc. In some parts of the country, the well-being of women is highly affected by these inequities. This study used spatial econometric techniques to investigate the spatial distribution of poverty among women and explored the main factors that determine the incidence of women poverty in Ghana.This study draws on the 2008 GDHS household's women data with their wealth factor scores (economic status) as the response variable. PCA technique was employed to obtain 13 components from an initial 27 socio-economic, demographic and geographic variables. These were the regression variables in GeoDa. The results show a highly positive significant Moran's I (I= 0.396; p=0.001), indicating that neighboring areas have similar poverty status; that is poverty is a geographical phenomenon. Also, the poverty maps identifed the three northern regions as the most endemic women poverty areas. The regression analysis further indicated that SLM [R2 = 79:2%;Log.L=-234;AIC=498;SC=558] fit the data better than the SEM [R2 = 79:0%;Log.L=-242;AIC=511;SC=568] and OLS [R2 = 74:0% ;Log.L=-270;AIC=569;SC=630] models. The selection of SLM indicates that the rate of poverty of one area affects the poverty rates of its neighbors. The major significant determinants of women poverty in 2008 were the education related variables, parity, some occupational related variables and marital status (married). The variables that had no significant relationships with poverty are female headed household and couple married without living together.

Source: KNUST
Sources of Microbial Contamination during Sobolo Drink Production

Beverages are liquid preparations specifically made for human consumption. Studies have shown that the consumption of beverages made from plants is increasing. Sobolo, one of these drinks which is also referred to as the Hibiscus tea, is prepared from the magenta leaves of Hibiscus sabdariffa. Nonetheless, regulatory institutions hardly check the quality of the drinks to ensure that it meets the Ghana Standards in terms of nutrition and microbial load and quality. Previous studies have focused on the microbial contamination of the hawked Sobolo drink. The study was therefore conducted to determine the microbial quality of the Sobolo drink and establish which stage(s) of the various unit operations involved in its preparation is/are prone to contamination. The snowball sampling method was employed in this study to locate the Sobolo producers. In all, twelve (12) producers were contacted for this survey. And fifty-two (52) samples were picked in triplicates across the different stages of the drink preparation processes: steeping stage, boiling stage, seizing and dilution stage and formulation stage. Overall, this study showed that the products that underwent the steeping stage was associated with a high mean microbial count (15cfu/100ml) as compared to those that did not undergo the steeping stage (9cfu/100ml) which was statistically significant (p-value = 0.021). Also, the study revealed that high microbial counts in raw water (18cfu/100ml) reduced significantly (p-value = 0.001) after boiling (6cfu/100ml), then increased slightly after sieving and dilution (7cfu/100ml), and also increased steeply after the final formulation stage (15cfu/100ml). This shows that the activities in the intermediate stages after boiling to the formulation stage increases the level of microbial contamination. It is therefore recommended that only boiled water is used to dilute the mixture if required.

Source: KNUST