Search

In Ghana, cocoa production is a major economic activity among rural farmers. Its production contributes significantly to the GDP and further, livelihood security enhancement among rural folks. However, recent development has unveiled a situation of persistent low farm-level productivity among cocoa farmers which threatens their livelihood security. In view of this, we estimated the economic, technical, and allocative efficiencies among cocoa farmers and their determinants to help proffer relevant policy strategies to arrest the situation of low farm-level productivity. Using a multistage sampling procedure, we collected data from 750 cocoa farmers across the cocoa-growing regions of Ghana. To estimate the farm-level efficiency scores, we employed the stochastic frontier analysis and our results show that cocoa farmers generally exhibited significant levels of technical, allocative, and economic inefficiencies. We estimated the average technical, allocative, and economic efficiencies scores among the cocoa farmers to be 67%, 69%, and 51% respectively. The analysis of the determinants of technical, allocative, and economic inefficiencies revealed that farmer and farm-specific variables such as sex, household size, educational level, years of farming experience, frequency of extension contact, quality of extension received, use of climate smart adaptation technologies, farm size, farm labour and access to credit facilities significantly explain cocoa farm level efficiencies. Accordingly, we recommend that extension service providers and COCOBOD develop strategies to improve upon the quality of extension service delivery as well as incorporate the promotion and adoption of climate smart adaptation technologies into its productivity enhancement programmes for farmers.

Funder: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Arboviral diseases such as dengue, Zika and chikungunya transmitted by Aedes mosquitoes have been reported in 34 African countries. Available data indicate that in recent years there have been dengue and chikungunya outbreaks in the West Africa subregion, in countries including Côte d'Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Gabon, Senegal, and Benin. These viral diseases are causing an increased public health burden, which impedes poverty reduction and sustainable development. Aedes surveillance and control capacity, which are key to reducing the prevalence of arboviral infections, need to be strengthened in West Africa, to provide information essential for the formulation of effective vector control strategies and the prediction of arboviral disease outbreaks. In line with these objectives, the West African Aedes Surveillance Network (WAASuN) was created in 2017 at a meeting held in Sierra Leone comprising African scientists working on Aedes mosquitoes. This manuscript describes the proceedings and discusses key highlights of the meeting.

Additional file 1: Table S1. Ambient and rearing water conditions for each temperature regime. Table S2. Mortality in An. gambiae s.l. mosquitoes exposed to pyrethroids. Table S3. Median levels of metabolic enzymes in An. gambiae s.l. mosquitoes reared at different temperature regimes. Table S4. Pairwise comparisons of enzyme levels in An. gambiae s.l. mosquitoes reared at different temperature regimes. Table S5. Mann–Whitney U-test between mosquitoes that were not exposed and those exposed to pyrethroids.

Additional file 1. Distribution of tick species collected from livestock during the study period.

Multilingual abstracts in the five official working languages of the United Nations. (PDF 262 kb)