Rural Education, Tuberculosis and Other Reports
Every week, RuralReporters.com collate reports on development issues in rural Africa and its environs.
This report includes some of our top picks from recent must-read research, interviews, blogs, and in-depth articles, carefully selected to help you keep up with global issues.
Here are some of the updates you may have missed from the previous week:
NGOs get N212.2m grant for rural education
Twenty one non-government organisations across Nigeria have been selected by the TY Danjuma Foundation to receive grants worth N212.2 million for community development in basic education.
The state coordinator of the foundation, Oluwatomi Ajayi, disclosed this at the annual grantees’ training and presentation of cheques worth N13.9 million to the five NGOs in Benin.
“The grant is for any state in Nigeria. So, the call is usually put out once in a year and organisations are expected to write from any part of the country. If their proposals are good enough, then we fund them,” she said.
The German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) has entered into a strategic partnership with the Alliance for Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) to combat hunger, create jobs and raise incomes in rural areas of Africa.
The partnership is based on a shared interest in: country, regional and continental agricultural priorities; investments and policies that advance agricultural incomes of the smallholders; food security; sustainable land use; and inclusive and sustainable agricultural transformation in Africa that fosters employment and economic opportunities.
Under the BMZ Special Initiative ‘One World – No Hunger’, Germany will contribute €10 million to co-finance AGRA’s five-year strategy (2017-2021) and to increase productivity, combat hunger, create jobs and raise incomes of 1.2 million smallholder farmers in Burkina Faso and Ghana, both focal countries of the German Development Cooperation in the agricultural sector and two of AGRA’s 11 priority countries.
Japanese road technology to ease business in rural areas
A new Japanese road construction and maintenance technology, Do-Nou, has been introduced in Rwanda with view to improve feeder roads condition in rural areas. The project also seeks to create employment opportunities, especially for the youth.
“Rural roads are in a critical condition, which hinders the pace of business development in one way or another. But I believe the technology is going to address this and create a lot of employment opportunities for the youth during the project implementation. We expect a successful implementation, not only in the targeted areas, but in other areas as well,” Miyashita said.
The new technology will specifically be applied in rural areas, with the first phase starting in March in the four districts of Rulindo and Gakenke in the Northern Province, and Nyamasheke and Rusizi in Western Province for a period of one year.
Facebook Expands Rural Efforts With TIP Team
On an increasingly global scale, Facebook and its fellow Telecom Infra Project (TIP) operator partners are taking on the challenge of connecting unserved areas via a number of collaborative efforts. At today’s Facebook press conference, Jay Parikh, Head of Engineering and Infrastructure for Facebook, joined five operators on stage to highlight new Telecom Infra Project (TIP) initiatives to connect rural areas in regions such as Africa and Latin America, make upgrades to Facebook’s Terragraph technology, expand to the OpenCellular platform and grow its TIP Ecosystem Acceleration Centers (TEAC).
“There isn’t one solution that can solve connectivity for everyone around the world,” said Parikh, offering an overview of the results of recent efforts with TIP partners — now totaling 500 — to address such industry challenges as global disparity in network connectivity.
AfDB Projects $1trn Rise For Food, Agriculture Market In Africa By 2030
Akinwunmi Adesina, the President of the African Development Bank (AfDB), said the African Development Bank is also pioneering the establishment of Staple Crop Processing Zones in 10 African countries that are expected to transform rural economies into zones of economic prosperity and save African economies billions of dollars in much needed foreign reserves.
“We must now turn the rural areas from zones of economic misery to zones of economic prosperity. This requires a total transformation of the agriculture sector. We must not just focus on primary production but on the development of agricultural value chains, that way, Africa will turn from being at the bottom to the top of global value chains,” he added.
Tuberculosis, a distant memory to most Americans, remains a serious public-health threat in developing countries, in part because the most common test for the disease was developed a century ago and is not the most reliable. Now, a team of basic chemists working in collaboration with doctors and public health researchers in South Africa has developed a new test that makes it easier to diagnose and therefore treat the disease.
The new test, which the researchers describe Feb. 28 in the journal Science Translational Medicine, is designed to work quickly and in places with few of the amenities – even seemingly basic ones like refrigeration – that many of us take for granted, said Carolyn Bertozzi, a professor of chemistry and senior author on the study.
Addressing that challenge took some luck, tuberculosis acumen and passion. “I’m from Burundi – I grew up around infectious disease,” said Mireille Kamariza, a graduate student in Bertozzi’s lab.
