Review on Performance of Formal Rural Financial Institutions in Ethiopia

The main objective of this paper is to review performance and challenges of rural financial institutions in Ethiopia. Performance of the industry was reviewed in terms of outreach, financial sustainability and welfare impact. The main challenges of the industry were also reviewed. Relevant secondary data for the study were collected from published sources. The total number of active borrowing clients of the microfinance institutions in Ethiopia reached over 2.4 million customers in 2011 whereas the total credit extended by all microfinance institutions amounted to Birr 6.9 billion. Of the total credit granted, the share of the three largest Microfinance institutions is Birr 5.1 billion. Dependency ratio measured by the ratio of donated equity to total capital decline, ratio of retained earnings to total capital is rising letting the industry to be financially self-sufficient. Microfinance programs have improved savings of the respondents through letting access to saving services and increasing household income out of which they can use to save. After joining microfinance programs, mean monthly expenditure of the respondents has significantly increased in food, clothing, housing furniture, health, education, and service items.  Limited loan products, absence of legal title of assets in rural areas, less willingness from commercial banks to lend to MFIs without collateral, the less conducive legal environment in enforcing the loan contract, and shortage of logistic in rural areas are the major challenges reviewed. Keywords: Microfinance, Sustainability, Outreac

Determinants of Active Tuberculosis among HIV-Positive Adults Attending Clinical Care in Ambo general hospital and Gedo hospital, West Shoa Zone, Oromia, Ethiopia (unmatched case-controlstudy)

Background: Diseases and conditions that weaken immunity, such as malnutrition, smoking, alcoholism, HIV/AIDS and diabetes, are factors that facilitate the development of active TB disease. The rapid growth of the HIV pandemic in many developing countries has resulted in an equally dramatic rise in the estimated number of new TB cases. The Objective of this study was to assess the determinants of active TB among HIV-positive adults attending clinical cares in Ambo general and Gedo hospitals, West Shoa zone. Methods and materials: A facility based unmatched case control study design was employed using Systematic Random Sampling method from May to August/ 2015. A total sample size of 123 TB/HIV co-infected patients from Cases and 246 HIV infected without TB infection patients from control groups were selected for the study. Data were entered to computer by Epi data version 3.2.1 and transferred to SPSS version 16 software package for analysis. To measure the strength of association between dependent and independent variables, odds ratio with a 95% confidence interval was done. Finally, logistic regression was done to control possible confounders and to identify independent predictors of active TB among HIV positive patients. Results: Active TB among HIV-positive adults was significantly associated with lack of formal educational (AOR 3.23, 95%CI 1.60, 6.81), under nourished (lower BMI <18.5) (AOR 2.62, 95%CI 1.23, 5.95), advanced WHO clinical stages (AOR 2.89, 95%CI 1.12, 4.96) and CD4+count<200/µL (AOR 2.5 95%CI 1.18, 4.97) and being married is the protective factor (AOR .20 95%CI 0.11, 0.50) Conclusion and Recommendation: lack of formal education, under nourished, advanced WHO clinical stages and CD4+ count <200/ µL were the independent predictors for active TB among HIV positive patients. People with TB/HIV co-infection are important targets for interventions such as early diagnose and treatment of opportunistic infection and giving  health education to prevent and control it

Needs Assessment Survey for M.Sc. Studies in Entomology in Ethiopia

Needs assessment survey were conducted in Ethiopia for launching M.Sc. studies in Entomology at Wollega University (WU), one of the public universities that aims to develop graduate programs in the western part of the country. The objective of the survey was to obtain training needs, gaps, specialization options, program structure and courses that are relevant to the needs of stakeholders associated with entomology. A facility-based data survey, focus group discussion (FGD) with key informants and needs assessment questionnaire to the stakeholders were used for data collection for the study. Data were analyzed by descriptive statistics. Facility survey results showed that average number of MSC holder Entomologists were very low. On average there were 0.19 MSc holder entomologists in Ethiopian universities, 0.33 in Ethiopian research sector and 0.15 in industrial sector. In line with these findings, participants of FGD revealed that most of the organization where they work need M.Sc. degree and above in entomology. Need assessment questionnaire survey results indicated 98.7% need for M.Sc level qualification in entomology, 96.0% need to employ new M.Sc graduates in entomology and 93.3% need for the Ethiopian organizations to upgrade their existing staff to M.Sc. level in entomology. In conclusion, the survey results underline high demand for M.Sc. training in Entomology in Ethiopia. Furthermore the concern of topsoil depletion and agricultural loss impacted by termite pests and white mango scale insects and biodiversity loss impacted by deforestation by insecticides warrant advanced entomological studies in western Ethiopia. Keywords: Insects, M.Sc. in Entomology, Need Assessment, Wollega Universit

Domestic Prevalence of Malaria Vectors and Self-reported Malaria Episode with Respect to Ownership and Utilization of Long-lasting Insecticidal Nets in Selected Resettlement and Indigenous Villages in Sasiga District, Western Ethiopia

Agricultural resettlement of none-immune population in malaria endemic lowlands has become one of the key challenges to malaria control and elimination efforts in Ethiopia. Long-lasting insecticidal nets (LLINs) are currently the best malaria control intervention in the country. We assessed indoor prevalence of malaria vectors and the disease incident with respect to possession and utilization of LLINs in selected resettlement and indigenous villages in Sasiga district, western Ethiopia. Adult mosquitoes were monitored indoors and outdoors from randomly selected samples of 12 houses using Centers for Disease Control and Prevention light traps (CDC-LTs). Whereas LLINs possession and utilization survey was conducted concurrently with household survey of self-reported malaria episode. The study was conducted once during dry season (December-February), minor malaria transmission season (March-May) and the major transmission season (September-December) in 2011-2012. Data were analysed using One-way analysis of variance, logistic regression (odd ratio) and descriptive statistics via SPSS version 20.0. The results were considered significant at P < 0.05. Anopheles gambiae s.l. constituted 81.1% (n=270) of the anopheline collection and the rest 18.9% (n=63) were Anopheles coustani and Anopheles cinereus. The mean indoor density of the malaia vector, An. gambiae s.l. was higher in the resettled than the indigenous village. The overall coverage and utilization rate for at least one LLIN per household was 62.2% and 62.0% for the indigenous but 72.8% and 72.2% for the resettled village, respectively. Average prevalence of self-reported malaria episode per household in the villages were 31.1% and 41.1% for the indigenous and the resettled villages in that order. Logistic regression revealed that use of nets for other purposes, saving nets for future use and possession of radio had significant association with net ownership and utilization in the surveyed households. Indoor malaria vector and the disease prevalence tend to increase in the resettled village than the indigenous village regardless of significantly higher net ownership and utilization in the former village. Therefore, the impact of housing, insecticide resistance and feeding behavior of the target vectors need to be monitored as they might impact on protective efficacy of LLINs. Keywords: Ethiopia, long-lasting insecticidal nets, self-reported malaria episode, resettlemen

Performance of Formal Rural Financial Institutions in Ethiopia: Country Review

The main objective of this paper is to review performance and challenges of rural financial institutions in Ethiopia. Performance of the industry was reviewed in terms of outreach, financial sustainability and welfare impact. The main challenges of the industry were also reviewed. Relevant secondary data for the study were collected from published sources. The total number of active borrowing clients of the microfinance institutions in Ethiopia reached over 2.4 million customers in 2011 whereas the total credit extended by all microfinance institutions amounted to Birr 6.9 billion. Of the total credit granted, the share of the three largest Microfinance institutions is Birr 5.1 billion. Dependency ratio measured by the ratio of donated equity to total capital decline, ratio of retained earnings to total capital is rising letting the industry to be financially self-sufficient. Microfinance programs have improved savings of the respondents through letting access to saving services and increasing household income out of which they can use to save. After joining microfinance programs, mean monthly expenditure of the respondents has significantly increased in food, clothing, housing furniture, health, education, and service items.  Limited loan products, absence of legal title of assets in rural areas, less willingness from commercial banks to lend to MFIs without collateral, the less conducive legal environment in enforcing the loan contract, and shortage of logistic in rural areas are the major challenges reviewed. Keywords: Microfinance, Sustainability, Outreac

Sentiment Analysis of Afaan Oromoo Facebook Media Using Deep Learning Approach

The rapid development and popularity of social media and social networks provide people with unprecedented opportunities to express and share their thoughts, views, opinions and feelings about almost anything through their personal webpages and blogs or using social network sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Blogger.  This study focuses on sentiment analysis of social media content because automatically identifying and classifying opinions from social media posts can provide significant economic values and social benefits. The major problem with sentiment analysis of social media posts is that it is extremely vast, fragmented, unorganized and unstructured. Nevertheless, many organizations and individuals are highly interested to know what other peoples are thinking or feeling about their services and products. Therefore, sentiment analysis has increasingly become a major area of research interest in the field of Natural Language Processing and Text Mining. In general, sentiment analysis is the process of automatically identifying and categorizing opinions in order to determine whether the writer's attitude towards a particular entity is positive or negative. To the best of the researcher’s knowledge, there is no Deep learning approach done for Afaan Oromoo Sentiment analysis to identify the opinion of the people on social media content. Therefore, in this study, we focused on investigating Convolutional Neural Network and Long Short Term Memory deep learning approaches for the development of sentiment analysis of Afaan Oromoo social media content such as Facebook posts comments. To this end, a total of 1452 comments collected from the official site of the Facebook page of Oromo Democratic Party/ODP for the study. After collecting the data, manual annotation is undertaken. Preprocessing, normalization, tokenization, stop word removal of the sentence are performed. We used the Keras deep learning python library to implement both deep learning algorithms. Long Short Term Memory and Convolutional Neural Network, we used word embedding as a feature. We conducted our experiment on the selected classifiers. For classifiers, we used 80% training and 20% testing rule. According to the experiment, the result shows that Convolutional Neural Network achieves the accuracy of 89%. The Long Short Memory achieves accuracy of 87.6%. Even though the result is promising there are still challenges. Keywords: Sentiment Analysis; Opinionated Afaan Oromoo facebook comments; Oromo Democratic Party Facebook page DOI: 10.7176/NMMC/90-02 Publication date:May 31st 202

Developing An Expert System Framework for Supporting Diagnosis and Treatment of Dyspepsia and Gastric Cancer Disease Using Local Language

Dyspepsia is a pain of the upper abdominal and it has the problem of impaired digestion like abdominal disease or other abdominal disease, which has the symptoms of heartburn, nausea, and belching, upper abdominal fullness [1]. It also related to the problem of indigestion for a group of symptoms that cause pain in the abdomen, which affects at least 25% of the world population every year [2].  From related disease of dyspepsia, Gastric cancer is the stomach cancer that develops from the lining of the stomach that affects the cell of digestive system and it is the third leading cause of death worldwide [3]. Both dyspepsia and gastric cancer is diseases that affect gastrointestinal part of human body. Therefore, this type of disease requires timely diagnosis and treatment; otherwise it can cause death and other chronic diseases. In developing countries like Ethiopia, treatment option for dyspepsia and gastric cancer is not readily available which support medical professional and also there is a scarcity of medical professional, to address such medical problems a medical expert system can play a significant role, consequently, the main objective of this research study is to develop an expert system framework for supporting diagnosis and treatment of dyspepsia and gastric cancer using local language (Amharic language). To develop this medical expert system, knowledge was acquired using both structured and unstructured interview from domain expert which are selected using purposive sampling techniques from Arba Minch General Hospital, and from document analysis. Domain knowledge is modeled using decision tree and rule-based knowledge representation was used. This medical expert system is developed by using backward chaining to infer the rule and provide an appropriate diagnosis. Finally, the performance of the system was evaluated by preparing 15 test cases by provided to domain experts and for user acceptance test, users evaluate the system through nine criteria prepared by the researcher and the system has scored 80% system performance and 85.2% user acceptance this result shows that the study has a promising result that achieves the objective of the study. The researchers recommended that to apply data mining techniques and to extract the hidden knowledge. Keywords: Expert System, Dyspepsia and Gastric Cancer, Diagnosis, and Treatment. DOI: 10.7176/CEIS/12-1-03 Publication date: January 31st 202

Determinants of Households’ Multidimensional Poverty: The Case of Nekemte City, Oromia, Ethiopia

The study aimed at analyzing determinants of households’ multidimensional poverty in Nekemte City. To achieve this objective, the study used both primary and secondary data. The primary data was collected using semi-structured questionnaire. Simple random sampling technique was followed to draw 379 sample household heads. For data analysis, both econometric and descriptive method was applied. From econometric models, binary logit regression model was employed. The logit model result indicated that household heads’ educational level, family size, dependency ratio, income, house ownership, saving habit and social capital are the major factors significantly influencing households’ multidimensional poverty in the city. Based on the findings, the study suggests improving economic activities, promoting access to education and improving saving habits. Moreover, improved targeting devices can be useful instruments in reducing multidimensional poverty, in particular to reach those in severe poverty. Keywords: Multidimensional poverty, logit, Ethiopia DOI: 10.7176/EJBM/14-21-01 Publication date: November 30th 202

Analysis of the Extent of Households’ Multidimensional Poverty: The Case of Nekemte City, Oromia, Ethiopia

The objective of the study was to examine the extent of households’ multidimensional poverty in Nekemte City. To achieve this objective, the study used both primary and secondary data. The primary data was collected from 379 sample household heads of Nekemte City through interview and questionnaire. It was based on cross sectional data collected during 2020/21. Alkire-Foster multidimensional poverty measurement: counting approach was employed to analyze the extent of multidimensional poverty in the study area. The result revealed that 20.6% of the population is under multidimensional poverty with average intensity and MPI of 41.5% and 8.55% respectively. Living standard dimension was the highest contributor to MPI followed by education dimension. Based on the findings, the study suggests improving economic activities, promoting access to education and improving saving habit. Moreover, improved targeting devices can be useful instruments in reducing poverty, in particular to reach those in severe poverty. Keywords: Multidimensional, poverty, Nekemte, city, Ethiopia, indicators, household DOI: 10.7176/EJBM/14-21-02 Publication date: November 30th 202

Synthesis and application of symmetric organocatalysts, stability studies of atropisomeric hydrazides by dynamic-HPLC and off-column HPLC experiments

This Ph.D. research program in Molecular Design and Characterization for the Promotion of Health and Well-being: From Drug to Food (XXXVII Cycle) at the Department of Chemistry and Drug Technologies at the University of Roma "Sapienza", under the supervision of Prof. Alessia Ciogli, aimed different topics whose the common unit is chirality. We studied the preparation of Symmetric Chiral Organocatalysts and their applications in the synthesis of enantioriched molecules together with the investigation of the Stereochemical Stability of Atropoisomeric Hydrazides by dynamic-HPLC and Off-Column HPLC experiments. The Ph.D. research and obtained results were collected in three distinct chapters. Part-A has been focused on the asymmetric synthesis of warfarin and analogues catalyzed by C2-symmetric amido and C3-symmetric amino-organocatalysts. The use of small chiral organic molecules as catalysts for stereoselective reactions has captured great attention and shown impressive advancement for the past two decades to attain enantiopure molecules mainly intermediates of pharmaceutical products with green chemistry principles and without purification. Today, organocatalysts are established as the third fundamental pillar in asymmetric catalysis, next to enzymes and metal-based catalysts. As concern the topic of my thesis, despite the advances of organocatalysts, applications in the synthesis of enantioenriched warfarin and its analogues still a significant synthetic challenge remained. We developed, in high yield, C2-symmetric amido and C3-symmetric amino-organocatalysts with easy synthetic procedures. The asymmetric Michael addition of 4-hydroxycoumarin to α, β-unsaturated ketones promoted by C2-symmetric amido-organocatalysts have shown good performance in yield and enantioselectivity than C3-symmetric amide prepared by installation of 1,3,5-benzenetricarbonyl trichloride onto a (2-Amino-1,2-diphenyl-ethyl)-carbamic acid tert-butyl ester. For C3-symmetric amino-organocatalysts, we have evaluated the chiral 1,2-diphenylethylendiamine (DPEDA) as scaffold where the core was the 1,3,5-benzoltricarbonyltrichloride. A small library of 4-hydroxycoumarin and 4-hydroxyquinoline derivatives was provided through a Michael addition. In addition, this novel C3-symmetric amino catalyst was used in gram-scale synthesis and transformation of product was well deserved. The second chapter (Part B) shows the results concerning the stereo stability studies of the atropoisomeric hydrazides by dynamic HPLC and off-column-HPLC experiments. The synthesis and analysis of the energy barrier needed for the racemization process of the studied molecules using a computational approach were done by collaborating with Prof. Giorgio Bencivenni at the University of Bologna. In this section, our aim focuses on the experimental determination of energy barriers through chromatographic approaches. Compounds that can exhibit optical properties due to the presence of axial chirality are widely studied and well-developed, while hydrazides represent a new class of atropisomers to be investigated. The knowledge of the rotational stability of such molecules is crucial for designing and developing newly important pharmaceutical drugs as well as gives the highest contribution in the separation of desired active enantiomer. Mainly, we focused on dynamic-HPLC and off-column HPLC experimental studies of these chiral molecules capable of interconverting their enantiomers upon rotation of the σ bonds. Experimental data were then used to extract the kinetic parameters and the free energy barrier of hindered rotation. Specifically for the dynamic-HPLC experiments, kinetic data were obtained by using the simulation software, Auto-D-HPLC-Y2K. The study of the symmetric amido-thiourea organocatalysts for the synthesis of α-aminonitriles (Part-C) was carried out at the Institute of Organic Chemistry in the research group of Prof. Olga Garcia, University of Munster (Germany). In this part, our goal is to develop C2-symmetric thiourea-organocatalysts using a spacer containing pyridine structure where hydrogen-bonding catalysis, anion-binding and Lewis-base have become the prime focus. The performance of the prepared catalysts was evaluated in the enantioselective Strecker reaction. Unfortunately, despite the very high product yields, the catalysts are not able of inducing stereoselection. To understand this trend, the analysis of anion binding abilities of dual hydrogen bond donor symmetric amido-thiourea (for the selected Cat-2) has been performed by titration experiments. Finally, these 3-years gave me a well-rounded view of different working environment and groups that prepare me for the next endeavors