Tag: News
In Kenya, tomato farming is a male affair
Smallholder tomato farming in Kenya remains dominated by older men despite efforts by the government NGOs to encourage women and youth into agriculture and to foster equality in land ownership, scientists have found. In Kenya, seven out of ten tomato growers are male according to a study conducted by a group of Nairobi-based scientists and […]
Getting watermelons to market in Benin
Watermelons are a popular fruit in Benin. But their profitability for market traders—95% of whom are women—is limited as a result of the country’s poor rural road network, a lack of storage facilities to stop melons from rotting, and the difficulty for traders to balance customer demand with supply. Sylvain Kpenavoun Chogou, an agronomist at […]
Options for keeping the lights on in Ghana
The thunk-thunk-thunk of generators is a common background noise in cities and villages where electrical power supplies are erratic. In Ghana, the government is investing in power generation capacity. But is it investing its money in the right technology? For a paper in Scientific African published in March 2019, four scientists from the country tested […]
Old cooking solutions could bring new benefits in Ethiopia
Cooking on open fires can waste fuel and produce smoke dangerous to human health—especially if the stove is located indoors. So, in the 1980s, Ethiopia rolled out two improved cooking stove designs: the Mirt made of cement and the Gonzie that could be made of local clays. Both offered similar benefits, requiring less fuel and […]
Yam genetics unveil cradle of agriculture in Africa
African yams were domesticated from a forest species and cultivated for the first time in an area around the Niger River. The findings, published in the journal Science in May, provide new evidence for a cradle of agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa. Nora Scarcelli from the French Research Institute for Development in Montpellier, France, and her […]
We’re very excited
To launch this first issue of Scientific African Magazine this month. When we launched Scientific African, peer-reviewed, open access, inter-and a multidisciplinary scientific journal that is dedicated to expanding access to African research, we got a lot of questions about how we would make sure policymakers and the public more broadly would know about the […]