ghanaopendata/ghanaian-research-english huggingface dataset:
Recent Advances in the Development of Biosensors for Malaria Diagnosis

The impact of malaria on global health has continually prompted the need to develop more e ective diagnostic strategies that could overcome deficiencies in accurate and early detection. In this review, we examine the various biosensor-based methods for malaria diagnostic biomarkers, namely; Plasmodium falciparum histidine-rich protein 2 (PfHRP-2), parasite lactate dehydrogenase (pLDH), aldolase, glutamate dehydrogenase (GDH), and the biocrystal hemozoin. The models that demonstrate a potential for field application have been discussed, looking at the fabrication and analytical performance characteristics, including (but not exclusively limited to): response time, sensitivity, detection limit, linear range, and storage stability, which are first summarized in a tabular form and then described in detail. The conclusion summarizes the state-of-the-art technologies applied in the field, the current challenges and the emerging prospects for malaria biosensors

Source: UG
Recent brackish water Foraminifera and Ostracoda from two estuaries in Ghana, and their potential as (palaeo)environmental indicators

To improve the indicator value of marginal marine Foraminifera and Ostracoda of Ghana, we analysed 22 surface sediment samples for microfauna. They were obtained from the Keta Lagoon and Densu Estuary covering a salinity range from marine waters to 17.5 and one sample within the hyperhaline range (70). Except one, all samples contain Ostracoda and Foraminifera. There are 34 ostracod species belonging to 24 genera. Dominating is Cyprideis remanei Klie, 1940, other abundant species are Pseudoconcha sp., Pseudoconcha hartmanni Omatsola, 1970, Loxoconcha lacunensis Omatsola, 1970 and Chrysocythere foveostriata Brady, 1870. We found 28 Foraminifera species belonging to 22 genera with the dominant taxa Ammonia sp. and Quinqueloculina spp. There are five associations, which are mainly driven by the hydrological regime and organic pollution. In contrast to a usual diversity trend reflecting high levels of pollution by lower diversity, our results show higher diversity associated with sites of higher pollution levels. The most tolerant (salinity and pollution) ostracod taxon is Cyprideis remanei, which is occurring over the whole salinity range documented as well as in contaminated areas with very high LOI and heavy metal concentrations. In the investigated samples we found many deformed Foraminifera with anomalies like multiple tests, changes in coiling and aberrant shapes of the chambers. Ongoing investigations in estuaries of Ghana are expanding our data set and will provide a better understanding of species-specific reactions of Ostracoda and Foraminifera to anthropogenic pressure.

Source: UG
Recent developments in African financial markets: Agenda for further research

Despite the massive expansion in global financial markets in the 1990s, this development was felt only marginally in Africa. The lack of comparable expansion and impact in the African financial markets was observed after several years of financial sector reforms in many countries. Following these developments, several questions can be raised about what the most appropriate reforms should be. It is obvious that while the taking over of the financial markets by the state, as happened before reforms, cannot be the best means to make finance respond to the developmental needs of poor economies, outright liberalisation of markets with significant institutional and structural inadequacies also cannot lead to the desired outcomes. This is clearly shown by the African experience of the 1980s and 1990s. Are there alternatives to these two approaches of managing financial systems and markets? Clearly, greater research needs to be undertaken into what the peculiar policy and institutional needs of these financial markets are, taking into account the structures of economies, and learning from recent developments in theory. © Centre for the Study of AfricanEconomies 2003; all rights reserved.

Source: UG
The Recent Growth Resurgence in Africa and Poverty Reduction: The Context and Evidence

While economic growth in Africa has resurged substantially since the mid-to-late 1990s, the amount of poverty reduction seems much less spectacular. Building on other studies, the paper explores the translation of the recent growth to poverty reduction using 1985–2013 PovcalNet (World Bank) data. It assesses the relative abilities of various panel-data methodologies to predict poverty changes based on income-inequality decompositions. Surprisingly, SYSGMM performs substantially worse than Fixed Effects and Random Effects. The analysis is conducted for both the $1.25 and $2.00 poverty lines, and for the ‘spread’ and ‘depth’ of poverty, as well as for the usual popular measure, the headcount ratio. Although income growth appears to be the main force behind poverty reduction in Africa, the decomposition reveals striking differences, across countries and poverty measures, with respect to the relative roles of inequality and income.

Source: UG
Recent increase in low complexity polygenomic infections and sialic acid-independent invasion pathways in Plasmodium falciparum from Western Gambia

Background The malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum utilizes multiple alternative receptor-ligand interac‑ tions for the invasion of human erythrocytes. While some P. falciparum clones make use of sialic acid (SA) residues on the surface of the human glycophorin receptors to invade the erythrocyte, others use alternative receptors independent of sialic acid residues. We hypothesized that over the years, intensifed malaria control interventions and declining prevalence in The Gambia have resulted in a selection of parasites with a dominant invasion pathways and ligand expression profles. Methods Blood samples were collected from 65 malaria-infected participants with uncomplicated malaria across 3 years (2015, 2016, and 2021). Genetic diversity was determined by genotyping the merozoite surface protein 2 (msp2) polymorphic gene of P. falciparum. Erythrocyte invasion phenotypes were determined using neuraminidase, trypsin, and chymotrypsin enzymes, known to cleave diferent receptors from the surface of the erythrocyte. Schiz‑ ont-stage transcript levels were obtained for a panel of 6 P. falciparum invasion ligand genes (eba175, eba181, Rh2b, Rh4, Rh5, and clag2) using 48 successfully cultured isolates. Results Though the allelic heterozygosity of msp2 repeat region decreased as expected with reduced transmission, there was an increase in infections with more than a single msp2 allelotype from 2015 to 2021. The invasion pheno‑ types of these isolates were mostly SA independent with a continuous increase from 2015 to 2021. Isolates from 2021 were highly inhibited by chymotrypsin treatment compared to isolates from 2015 and 2016. Higher invasion inhibi‑ tion for 2021 isolates was further obtained following erythrocyte treatment with a combination of chymotrypsin and trypsin. The transcript levels of invasion ligand genes varied across years. However, levels of clag2, a rhoptry associated protein, were higher in 2015 and 2016 isolates than in 2021 isolates, while Rh5 levels were higher in 2021 compared to other years. Conclusions Overall, these fndings suggest increasing mixed infections with an increase in the use of sialic-acid independent invasion pathways by P. falciparum clinical isolates in the Western part of Gambia

Source: UG
Recent Trends in the Daily Rainfall Regime in Southern West Africa.

Extreme climate events, either being linked to dry spells or extreme precipitation, are of major concern in Africa, a region in which the economy and population are highly vulnerable to climate hazards. However, recent trends in climate events are not often documented in this poorly surveyed continent. This study makes use of a large set of daily rain gauge data covering Southern West Africa (extending from 10◦ W to 10◦ E and from 4◦ N to 12◦ N) from 1950 to 2014. The evolution of the number and the intensity of daily rainfall events, especially the most extremes, were analyzed at the annual and seasonal scales. During the first rainy season (April–July), mean annual rainfall is observed to have a minor trend due to less frequent but more intense rainfall mainly along the coast of Southern West Africa (SWA) over the last two decades. The north–south seasonal changes exhibit an increase in mean annual rainfall over the last decade during the second rainy season (September–November) linked by both an increase in the frequency of occurrence of rainy days as well as an increase in the mean intensity and extreme events over the last decade. The study also provides evidence of a disparity that exists between the west and east of SWA, with the east recording a stronger increase in the mean intensity of wet days and extreme rainfall during the second rainy season (September–November).

Source: UG
Recent Trends in The Use of Nanomaterials for Wastewater Treatment: A Minireview

Man’s life depends on water in many ways. Worldwide industrialization and water resource exploitation have accelerated during the past few decades. Heavy metals and other pollutants, including effluent wastewater, are released into water streams as a result of industrial activity all over the world. Due to their toxicity, these contaminants are thought to be hazardous to both man and the environment and lower the quality of water. Even in low concentrations, heavy metals can be extremely harmful to living things. Numerous methods have been investigated for treating wastewater for many years. However, the discipline of nanotechnology has recently shown the world how to solve the issue of wastewater treatment using creative and practical methods.

Source: UG
Reciprocity in global social protection: providing care for migrants’ children

Migration research tends to conceptualize migrants as providers of social protection for people back home. Yet the care conducted within transnational families and the way it is organized is an integral part of a global social protection system which is based on reciprocity between migrants and their families in their home countries. This system relies on the work of people back home just as much as on the remittances of migrants overseas. Drawing on ethnographic data from 34 caregivers, we provide a detailed description of the work conducted by people in Ghana to care for migrants’ children and analyze what caregivers do to make this work possible. We find that caregivers have small networks of support they can rely on and identify the strategies they develop when remittances are not forthcoming or enough to cater for the material needs of migrants’ children.

Source: UG
Reclaiming stewardship in Ghana religion and climate change

The hydra-headed nature of climate change-affecting not just climate but all other domains of human life-requires not just technological fixes but cultural innovation. It is impossible to ignore a devoutly religious majority in Ghana, a nation where diverse religious communities' perspectives on climate change and their views on the way forward are crucial. This article aims to empirically explore how Christian, Islamic, and indigenous African religious leaders view the challenges of climate change and what countermeasures they propose. Interestingly, most our informants have indicated that the reasons for the current environmental crisis are, in equal degree, Ghana's past colonial experience and deviation from religious beliefs and practice, while the main obstacle to sustainable development is poverty. There was unanimity on the reclamation of religious values and principles that promote the idea of stewardship as a way forward toward a sustainable future. This, however, functions more as a faith claim and a religiously inspired normative postulate than a program of concrete action.

Source: UG
Recognition and Integration of Traditional Medicine in Ghana: A Perspective

The paper examines the processes of recognition and legitimization of traditional medicine in Ghana and indicates that in Ghana, indigenous medicine has been used as an instrument to help develop political consensus and consciousness and in the building of a national identity. The Ghanaian government recognizes traditional medicine and has a policy for the integration of indigenous medicine; the paper shows that the policy limits traditional medicine almost exclusively to herbal products and the scientific elements of it without taking into consideration its other dimensions of treating illnesses. Thus the policy leads to bureaucratization of traditional medicine. The paper calls for a policy of integration that will promote a parallel and full development of both orthodox and indigenous therapeutic traditions to enable them to continue to provide the health care needs of the people. Résumé Cet article analyse les processus de reconnaissance et de légitimisation de la médicine traditionnelle au Ghana et postule qu’au Ghana la médicine indigène permet non seulement de forger le consensus politique et la conscience politique mais aussi d’édifier une identité nationale. Le gouvernement ghanéen reconnait la médicine traditionnelle et a mis en place des politiques en faveur de l’intégration de la médicine traditionnelle. Il ressort dans cet article que ladite politique limite la médicine traditionnelle quasi exclusivement à des produits à base d’herbes et à leurs éléments scientifiques sans prendre en compte ses autres dimensions thérapeutiques. Aussi la politique mène-t-elle à la bureaucratisation de la médicine traditionnelle. L’article plaide en faveur d’une politique d’intégration apte à promouvoir le développement parallèle des traditions thérapeutiques orthodoxe et traditionnelle en vue d’assurer aux populations des soins médicaux durables.

Source: UG
Recognition of Augmented Frontal Face Images Using FFT-PCA/ SVD Algorithm

In spite of the differences in visual stimulus of human beings such as ageing, changing conditions of a person, and occlusion, recognition can even be done at a glance by the human eye many years after the previous encounter. It has been established that facial differences like the hairstyle changes, growing of one’s beard, wearing of glasses, and other forms of occlusions can hardly hinder the power of the human brain from making a face recognition. However, the same cannot easily be said about automated intelligent systems which have been developed to mimic the skill of the human brain to aid in recognition. There have been growing interests in developing a resilient and efficient recognition system mainly because of its numerous application areas (access control, entertainment/leisure, security system based on biometric data, and user-friendly human-machine interfaces). Although there have been numerous researches on face recognition under varying pose, illumination, expression, and image degradations, problems caused by occlusions are mostly ignored. )is study thus focuses on facial occlusions and proposes an enhancement mechanism through face image augmentation to improve the recognition of occluded face images. This study assessed the performance of Principal Component Analysis with Singular Value Decomposition using Fast Fourier Transform (FFT-PCA/SVD) for preprocessing face recognition algorithm on face images with missingness and augmented face image database. It was found that the average recognition rates for the FFT-PCA/SVD algorithm were the same (90%) when face images with missingness and augmented face images were used as test images, respectively. )e statistical evaluation revealed that there exists a significant difference in the average recognition distances for the face images with missingness and augmented face images when FFT-PCA/SVD is used for recognition. Augmented face images tend to have a relatively lower average recognition distance when used as test images. This finding is contrary to the equal performance assessment by the adopted numerical technique. The MICE algorithm is therefore recommended as a suitable imputation mechanism for enhancing/improving the performance of the face recognition system.

Source: UG
Recognition of Face Images under Angular Constraints Using DWT-PCA/SVD Algorithm

The intricacy of a face’s features originates from continuous changes in the facial features that take place over time. Regardless of these changes, we are able to recognize a person very easily. In human interactions, the articulation and perception of constraints; like head-poses, facial expressions form a communication channel that is additional to voice and that carries crucial information about mental, emotional and even physical states of a conversation. Automatic face recognition is worthwhile, since an efficient and resilient recognition system is useful in many application areas. This paper presents an evaluation of the performance of principal component analysis with singular value decomposition using discrete wavelet transform (DWT-PCA/SVD) for preprocessing under angular constraints. Ten individuals from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) database (2003-2005) captured under the specified angular constraints were considered for recognition runs. Friedman’s rank sum test was used to ascertain whether significant differences exist between the median recognition distances of the various constraints from their straight-pose. Recognition rate and runtime were adopted as the numerical evaluation methods to assess the performance of the study algorithm. All numerical and statistical computations were done using Matlab. The results of the Friedman’s rank sum test show that the higher the degrees of head-pose, the larger the recognition distances and that at and above, the recognition distances become profoundly larger compared to the head-pose. The numerical evaluations show that DWT-PCA/SVD face recognition algorithm has an appreciable average recognition rate (87.5%) when used to recognize face images under angular constraints. Also, the recognition rate decreases for head-poses greater than Discrete wavelet transform is recommended as a viable noise removal mechanism that should be adopted during image preprocessing.

Source: UG
Recognizing the contribution of female entrepreneurs in economic development in Sub-Saharan Africa: Some evidence from Ghana

In recent decades, female entrepreneurs have been seen to contribute to the economic development of nations especially in developing countries. Until now the contribution of female entrepreneurs to economic development in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) has been relegated to the background or ignored in development circles. Part of the reason is because female entrepreneurs mainly work in the informal economy and are necessity driven and marginalized. The main research question the study poses is 'what is the contribution of female entrepreneurs to socio-economic development in SSA?' This paper seeks to answer this by examining critically the contribution of female entrepreneurs from Ghana as a means to achieve economic development. The study employs a qualitative approach using multiple case study design. To examine female entrepreneurship, a 2014 survey involving face-to-face interviews of 60 female entrepreneurs from Accra in Ghana is analyzed. The key finding is that, although male entrepreneurs contribute significantly more to economic development than their female counterparts, there remains untapped potential for female entrepreneurs becoming key players for achieving economic development. This and other findings of the study have some implications for policy on female entrepreneurship. Therefore, there is a call to harness these potentials through policies that would promote female entrepreneurship onan equal wavelength as their male counterparts. This is the first known study of female entrepreneurship as a catalyst for economic development in Ghana. © 2015 World Scientific Publishing Company.

Source: UG
Recognizing the Contribution Of Female Entrepreneurs In Economic Development In Sub-Saharan Africa: Some Evidence From Ghana

In recent decades, female entrepreneurs have been seen to contribute to the economic development of nations especially in developing countries. Until now the contribution of female entrepreneurs to economic development in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) has been relegated to the background or ignored in development circles. Part of the reason is because female entrepreneurs mainly work in the informal economy and are necessity driven and marginalized. The main research question the study poses is 'what is the contribution of female entrepreneurs to socio-economic development in SSA?' This paper seeks to answer this by examining critically the contribution of female entrepreneurs from Ghana as a means to achieve economic development. The study employs a qualitative approach using multiple case study design. To examine female entrepreneurship, a 2014 survey involving face-to-face interviews of 60 female entrepreneurs from Accra in Ghana is analyzed. The key finding is that, although male entrepreneurs contribute significantly more to economic development than their female counterparts, there remains untapped potential for female entrepreneurs becoming key players for achieving economic development. This and other findings of the study have some implications for policy on female entrepreneurship. Therefore, there is a call to harness these potentials through policies that would promote female entrepreneurship on an equal wavelength as their male counterparts. This is the first known study of female entrepreneurship as a catalyst for economic development in Ghana.

Source: UG
Recognizing, supporting and embracing the urban informal economy in Ghana: A local economic development perspective

The informal economy has become a vibrant and growing phenomenon across the world. Within the context of sustainable development, connecting local economic development (LED) to the informal economy is imperative. However, the informal economy remains largely neglected within the conventional LED literature. Using key informant interviews and focus group discussions, this paper found that recognizing, embracing and supporting informal economy contributes to a more inclusive form of LED. The study concluded that local government authorities need to be more innovative in recognising the informal economy as part of local governments’ strategies for addressing unemployment, and supporting livelihoods.

Source: UG
Recombinant ESAT-6-CFP10 Fusion Protein Induction of Th1/Th2 Cytokines and FoxP3 Expressing Treg Cells in Pulmonary TB

The Department of Parasitology conducts research into parasitic diseases of public health importance with the overall goal of reducing their transmission and the heavy disease burden that they impose on affected populations. The Department maintains focus on parasitic diseases in general. These include major diseases such as malaria, and others listed under the Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTD) control initiative such as, lymphatic filariasis, onchocerciasis, schistosomiasis, soil-transmitted helminthiasis, trypanosomiasis and leishmaniasis.

Source: UG
Recombinant Pfs25 protein of plasmodium falciparum elicits malaria transmission-blocking immunity in experimental animals

Pfs25 is a sexual stage antigen of Plasmodium falciparum that is expressed on the surface of zygote and ookinete forms of the parasite. Monoclonal antibodies directed against native Pfs25 can block completely the development of P. falciparum oocysts in the midgut of the mosquito vector. Thus, this 25-kD protein is a potential vaccine candidate for eliciting transmission-blocking immunity in inhabitants of malaria endemic regions. We have synthesized, by secretion from yeast, a polypeptide analogue of Pfs25 that reacts with conformation-dependent monoclonal antibodies, and elicits transmission-blocking antibodies when used to immunize mice and monkeys in conjunction with a muramyl tripeptide adjuvant. Our results suggest the further evaluation of recombinant DNA-derived Pfs25 in transmission-blocking vaccination studies in humans.

Source: UG