MIL Africa Engine

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Pape Abdoulaye Seck, chercheur, Académie nationale des sciences et techniques du Sénégal (ANSTS)

Agriculture is the lifeblood of Africa. More than 60% of African households depend directly or indirectly on the land for their livelihoods. And the continent has nearly 60% of the world’s uncultivated arable land.

Farming is a fragile sector, however. It has to deal with climate change, market volatility, weak infrastructure and demographic pressure. Addressing these challenges requires political commitment and investment. It also requires science, innovation and high-quality research.

I have been involved in scientific research, particularly agricultural research, for more than four decades. My roles have included researcher, member of multiple science academies, director general of the Africa Rice Center/CGIAR, and Senegal’s minister in charge of agricultural research.

Throughout these years, one criticism has repeatedly surfaced: agricultural research is often perceived as expensive while delivering little for people. This perception is widely shared and frequently echoed in political and media debates.

Based on my experience, I believe the criticism rests on a questionable assumption: that the impact of science depends exclusively on those who produce it. When innovations fail to change the world, scientists themselves are often presented as the culprits.

The reality is far more complex. The history of agricultural transformation across the world shows that research alone never changes societies. Impact follows when an agricultural ecosystem effectively connects science to producers, markets, finance, institutions and public policy.

International institutions have highlighted the difficulties many developing countries face in turning scientific knowledge into development. The reasons include weak innovation ecosystems, too little infrastructure and limited institutional coordination.

An example of what success looks like is the Green Revolution in Asia. Scientific breakthroughs improved wheat and rice varieties which transformed agriculture. It was not simply because the science was strong. There were other factors too. They included governments investing in irrigation, extension services, rural infrastructure, credit systems and market organisation.

In India and Vietnam, for example, science operated within a coherent system linking researchers, farmers, institutions and markets.

Science generates knowledge, informs policies, stimulates innovation and opens new possibilities. But it does not change societies on its own.

The missing parts

Recent decades have brought advances on a number of fronts. In seeds, irrigation, soil fertility management, climate adaptation, biotechnology, digital agriculture, agroecology and sustainable food systems.

African researchers, universities and international agricultural research centres have contributed enormously to this progress.

Rwanda and Ethiopia provide useful examples of how coordinated ecosystems can speed up change. In both, stronger links between research, extension systems, public investment and farmer support mechanisms have made a difference. They have contributed to faster uptake of new technologies. And they have led to productivity gains in several strategic crops such as maize, rice, cassava, beans and soybeans.

Another example is rice. During my years at AfricaRice, I saw major scientific advances in rice research. This included the development of New Rice for Africa varieties. ⁠ These resulted from years of scientific work combining the high productivity potential of Asian rice with the resilience of African rice, particularly its tolerance to drought, poor soils and local climatic stresses. It wasn’t easy, because the two rice species are genetically distant.

Farmers quickly took up the new varieties. Farmer incomes and food production improved in countries where governments, seed systems, extension services and development partners worked together. In Uganda, Guinea and several west African countries, coordinated programmes helped accelerate adoption among smallholder farmers.

These examples show that effective agricultural innovation will only be adopted and scaled if several conditions are met together. These include:

• access to inputs and technologies

• accessible financing

• efficient extension services

• functioning infrastructure

• organised markets

• coherent, predictable public policies.

Without these conditions, innovations often remain confined to research stations, pilot projects or scientific publications. Where seed systems, rural financing or market organisation are weak, good science makes little difference.

In several African countries, farmers aren’t using improved seed varieties because they can’t get certified seeds at scale. Likewise, promising innovations in irrigation, post-harvest technologies or digital agriculture have struggled because of weaknesses in infrastructure, rural credit or institutional coordination.

What’s needed

Debates on agricultural research in Africa must go beyond simplistic criticism. Agricultural research should not be viewed as a cost. Rather it is a strategic investment in food security, economic sovereignty, environmental sustainability, public health, social stability and human dignity.

Blaming science for lacking impact masks the weaknesses of broader development systems.

As Africa faces the defining challenge of the 21st century – feeding its population without destroying the planet – it would be a mistake to weaken scientific research. The continent must instead strengthen alliances between science, policy, finance, private sector actors, farmers, universities and civil society.

Across Africa, emerging innovation platforms show that when these actors work together, scientific advances can create tangible economic and social change. The challenge now is to broaden this beyond isolated successes.

In the end, the impact of science is a collective responsibility.

And science can only change the world when societies decide to give it the means to do so.

– Agriculture in Africa: science and research can’t make an impact without investment and good policies
– https://theconversation.com/agriculture-in-africa-science-and-research-cant-make-an-impact-without-investment-and-good-policies-282430

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Steve Lindsay, Emeritus professor, Durham University

Malaria, diarrhoea and pneumonia are preventable childhood diseases that are major causes of death in young children. They’re transmitted largely in and around the home, where children spend most of their time.

For example, around 80% of malaria transmission in Africa occurs when people are bitten by malarial mosquitoes indoors at night. Diarrhoea results usually from food and water that’s been contaminated by faeces. It can also be spread through poor hygiene. Pneumonia is spread through overcrowding and poor ventilation, and is exacerbated by indoor air pollution.

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Read more: Africa needs 50 million new homes, but building is bad for the environment: how to finance ‘green’ solutions

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We are an international group of specialists from different fields including architecture, communications, global health, medical anthropology, public health entomology, engineering and statistics.

To see if it might be possible for a newly designed house to help prevent malaria, pneumonia and diarrhoea in children, one of us (Danish architect Jakob Knudsen) came up with a new design. We called it the Star home.

This house costs 24% less in materials than a conventional single-storey cement-block house. It also uses 73% less concrete, and generates 57% less embodied carbon (the amount of carbon emissions released from the time raw materials are turned into building materials for the house to the end of the home’s life). Our analysis revealed a fourfold return on investment over 50 years once health, water, cooling and energy savings are accounted for.

The features of the Star home are:

• Double-storey buildings. Bedrooms are positioned on the upper floor, away from mosquitoes, which are most abundant at ground level.

• Cross-ventilation, where air passes across the room. We increased ventilation inside the home by using walls made of shade net, instead of solid walls. These also cooled sleeping areas and deterred mosquitoes from entering the room.

• Mosquito screens on doors and windows. These screens keep malaria mosquitoes and flies out.

• Self-closing doors. These minimise the entry of mosquitoes and flies.

• Clean water harvesting, improved pit latrines and improved cooking stoves.

We put the Star home through a three year, peer-reviewed trial to see if it could reduce malaria, diarrhoea and pneumonia among children.

Our findings were startling: After three years, children living in the Star homes had 44% less clinical malaria, 30% less diarrhoea and 18% less pneumonia than those living in traditional houses.

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Read more: Nigeria has Africa’s highest malaria death rate – progress is being made, but it’s not enough

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Because they were protected from three serious illnesses, their overall health improved and the children grew taller than children living in traditional houses.

Our study also demonstrated that the new, comfortable Star house has a lower carbon footprint than the cement-block houses that are currently built in sub-Saharan Africa. Put simply, we used less energy to build a Star home than is used in building a typical cement house constructed in a village.

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Read more: Health risks at home: a study in six African countries shows how healthy housing saves children’s lives

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We also found that passive cooling in the Star home made the home more comfortable in hot weather even though it did not have air conditioning, which consumes energy.

Our study demonstrates that small improvements in design are likely to make a major health impact on the lives of children in Africa.

The ground work

We first set about understanding how the pathogens causing the three diseases spread in and around the home.

Malaria: How mosquitoes enter houses has been the subject of research for decades. Research shows that they find people mainly by smell. From far away, they follow the carbon dioxide humans breathe out, and when they get closer, they are guided by smells produced by bacteria on human skin.

Diarrhoea: Houses with a regular supply of clean water, clean food preparation areas, fly-proof latrines and kitchens can help reduce the spread of this disease.

Pneumonia: This is spread through air-borne pathogens and is made worse by smoke-filled kitchens which damage the lungs.

We then developed the Star homes and tested whether they were healthier by carrying out a randomised controlled trial in southern Tanzania, an area with high levels of malaria.

In the trials, we recruited children under 13 years of age and randomly allocated them to 110 Star homes and 513 traditional mud and thatched-roof houses.

These children were followed weekly for signs of illness for three years and the data from the clinical trial were analysed.

Africa’s housing boom: a chance to build healthier homes

Africa’s population is the most rapidly expanding in the world, with the current population of 1.5 billion people expected to increase to 2.7-3.7 billion by 2070.

Hundreds of millions of new homes will need to be constructed soon.

There has never been a better time to build healthier homes on the continent. Improvements in rural housing are increasing at a fast pace.

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Read more: Building Zambian homes with local materials delivers benefits that imports don’t: study

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Governments can take a number of steps to help. For example, they can facilitate the construction of better rural homes by assuring ownership rights (titles). These are essential for homeowners who want to apply for loans to carry out healthy home improvements. Governments could also reduce import taxes on fly screening, and provide advice and support for the construction of healthy homes.

We hope that this study will stimulate further innovation by people working in the built environment who could collaborate with local communities to construct healthier homes for rural people in low- and middle-income countries. Simple improvements in housing can have profound impacts on improving public health.

(About our team: Salum Mshamu, a Tanzanian scientist, carried out trials on the Star home as part of his PhD studies at Oxford University. Jakob Knudsen has been designing healthy and cooler homes in the tropics, particularly in Tanzania, for over 30 years. Lorenz von Seidlein is a paediatric clinician who has studied the epidemiology and control of childhood infections, principally malaria, in different parts of the tropics. Steve Lindsay has over 40 years of experience working on the control of mosquitoes and flies, including running clinical trials of housing interventions.)

– Better-designed homes could cut three major child diseases by up to 44% – Tanzania trial
– https://theconversation.com/better-designed-homes-could-cut-three-major-child-diseases-by-up-to-44-tanzania-trial-281890

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Moses Ngware, Senior Research Scientist, African Population and Health Research Center

Many countries across Africa have embraced universal basic education policies in recent decades. But recent data has revealed that more than 100 million children and adolescents remain out of school, out of a total potential population of 469 million. The latest statistics suggest that after some years of progress, the situation is deteriorating. Education and youth empowerment scholar Moses Ngware and his co-researchers recently carried out an analysis of trends going back 25 years. Their main findings are set out below.

What are the school attendance trends in Africa across all age groups?

In 2000, the number of out-of-school children in primary school, lower secondary and upper secondary was above 100 million. It was down to about 90 million in 2014, and then up again to 100 million by 2025.

Viewed against Africa’s high population growth of above 2.5%, these absolute numbers suggest that school participation is not keeping pace.

Nevertheless, between 2000 and 2024, the proportion of out-of-school children and adolescents declined at all education levels. It fell from 37% to 20% for primary schools; from 47% to 35% for lower secondary and from 56% to 47% for upper secondary school-age children. This is despite the absolute numbers of out-of-school children remaining high.

Countries that showed greatest improvement included Côte d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Guinea, Madagascar and Mozambique. Improvements were driven by at least two main factors. First, targeted policy responses that enabled them to achieve good coverage in a short time. Second, a strong political will combined with a multi-sectoral approach. The approaches included combining conditional cash transfers for households, food supplies, expanding access to schools and implementing universal education policies that reduce cost of schooling for households.

On the other hand, there are countries that made little or no progress. They include Angola, Cape Verde, Lesotho, South Sudan and Zimbabwe. The main drivers of the low progress are:

• political instability, as seen in South Sudan

• poor economic performance, as witnessed in Zimbabwe

• the high opportunity cost of schooling, as seen in Lesotho, where boys drop out due to poverty related coping mechanisms, including herding cattle, with only one in every five boys completing grade 12.

What are the notable changes in recent years?

In the past five years, we have seen a steady increase in absolute numbers of out-of-school children and adolescents from 95 million to 100 million, with an average of about 1 million children either not transitioning from primary to secondary school or leaving school or not joining school at all.

There are two main drivers of such a trend. First, finance – the fizzling effect of the universal basic education subsidies of the early 2000s. These subsidies made basic education affordable to many households. Of the 42 African countries with free education in their policies, only three were in a position to offer free schooling in 2025. Donor funding of education by multilateral organisations has also been reduced, with education aid in Africa declining by 7% in 2024. Second, the negative impact of COVID-19, with about 10 million who left school due to the lockdowns never to return, for various reasons, including forced marriages among girls and child labour for boys.

Across all the schooling levels, higher than before rates of out-of-school children and adolescents were observed in the Sahel region, in Central African Republic, Chad, Mauritania and northern Nigeria. These countries or regions are characterised by politically motivated violence, harsh climatic changes and a history of low school participation.

Why is school completion important for societies?

The main benefits to societies of school completion include transition to decent work, girls’ empowerment, and improved health outcomes. An additional year of schooling increases an individual’s lifetime earnings by about 10% on average, with a potential to increase an individual’s purchasing power. Such benefits can also trickle down to households through providing household financial stability and enhanced family support.

For girls, school completion is critical for participation in decision making at societal level. Research shows that a woman’s power to make decisions, such as education for her children or where to invest, increases with education attainment. This has a bearing on economic independence and gender equity within the society.

Furthermore, and related to these two benefits, children of mothers who have completed secondary education have a 45% lower under-3 mortality rate. This implies that such children have about half the risk of death before age 3 compared to those born to mothers with no education.

What are the gender dynamics?

By 2025, the proportion of males that were out of school, at 51%, was only slightly higher than that of females. However, the out-of-school female rate was on the rise – up by two percentage points in 10 years.

If this growth continues, then the proportion of out-of-school females will overtake that of males in the coming years. This will compound the vulnerabilities disadvantaged girls face in their schooling journey and transition to work.

In addition, the gains made in the last three decades in closing gender gaps in education will be eroded. Eroding the gains made in education has severe consequences, especially for girls. For instance, we are likely to see an increase in females getting married much earlier, and child bearing among adolescents may also increase.

What lessons can we learn from the better-placed countries?

There are a number of important lessons to be learnt from countries that have lowered the number of out-of-school children and adolescents.

First, Algeria, Ghana, Kenya and Rwanda have relied on a strong national policy framework backed by political good will, high-level central coordination and donor-partner support.

Second is the importance of targeted social support such as school feeding and conditional cash transfers. Close evaluations using hard data are needed.

Third is the elimination of significant direct fees or levies at basic education level, with timely financial disbursements and school supplies.

Fourth is the lesson that affirmative action for vulnerable populations is an invaluable investment. These populations include disadvantaged girls, children from remote rural areas, children with disabilities, and children from poor households.

Finally, there are other interventions that can add value depending on the context. These include reducing travel distance through expanding infrastructure, and flexible school entry, such as late entry to improve participation. Another is catch-up programmes, which means accelerating progression to recover lost time and learning.

– 100 million African children are not in school. What’s driving the trend and how to reverse it
– https://theconversation.com/100-million-african-children-are-not-in-school-whats-driving-the-trend-and-how-to-reverse-it-280637