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"Internet Africa, North."
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Broadband networks in the Middle East and North Africa
Just as the steam engine was the driving force behind the Industrial Revolution, broadband Internet is today seen as critical to the transition to knowledge-intensive economies across the world. As a general purpose technology, broadband Internet is considered as a fundamental driver of economic growth and social development, releasing the innovative potential and energy of previously disenfranchised members of the population. Many of the countries in the Middle East and North Africa region (MENA) now recognize that broadband Internet is crucial to their efforts to reduce poverty and create job opportunities, especially for their young populations and for women. The report re-emphasizes the important contribution that broadband Internet can make and assesses the status of existing infrastructure in at least 18 MENA countries. While there is significant potential across the region, however, the take-up of broadband Internet has been slow, and the price of broadband service is high in many countries. In large part, this stems from market structures that, too often, reflect the past when telecommunications were treated as a monopoly utility service. The report finds that there are gaps in infrastructure regionally with no connectivity between neighboring countries in some cases. Similarly, there are gaps within countries exacerbating the (digital) divide between rural and urban areas. The report examines the regulatory and market bottlenecks that are hampering the growth of the Internet in these and other MENA countries: the five North African countries (Algeria, Egypt, Morocco, Libya, Tunisia); the six Mashreq countries (the Islamic Republic of Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and the West Bank and Gaza economy); the six Gulf countries (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates); and Djibouti and the Republic of Yemen. The report provides policy and regulatory options for increasing effective use of existing fixed and mobile infrastructure as well as alternative infrastructure networks such as power grids and railroads. It explains the benefits of effective cross-sector infrastructure construction frameworks, highlighting the need to adjust market structures to foster competitive behavior among service providers to bring down prices and stimulate the demand for value-added services to drive future broadband development.
eBook
Advertising in MENA goes digital
\"An inside story of local, regional and global advertising in the Middle East. Grounded in empirical research and theories, this book explores the evolution of advertising practices, audiences, digital media and communication technologies in increasingly complex MENA environments\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Benchmarking Digital Government Strategies in MENA Countries
This report benchmarks digital government strategies in MENA countries against OECD standards and best practices. Using the OECD Recommendation of the Council on Digital Government Strategies as analytical framework, the report provides an in-depth look at the efforts made by Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Tunisia and the United Arab Emirates to use digital technologies strategically to support broader policy objectives. New technologies can help foster economic value creation, make institutions more inclusive, improve competitiveness and promote effective decision-making in the public sector. This report also assesses the use of ICTs to strengthen trust in government through greater openness and engagement, and suggests how MENA countries can better co-ordinate and steer the digital transformation of the public sector.
eBook
Assessment of eating habits and lifestyle during the coronavirus 2019 pandemic in the Middle East and North Africa region: a cross-sectional study
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has rapidly spread globally, forcing countries to apply lockdowns and strict social distancing measures. The aim of this study was to assess eating habits and lifestyle behaviours among residents of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region during the lockdown. A cross-sectional study among adult residents of the MENA region was conducted using an online questionnaire designed on Google Forms during April 2020. A total of 2970 participants from eighteen countries participated in the present study. During the pandemic, over 30 % reported weight gain, 6·2 % consumed five or more meals per d compared with 2·2 % before the pandemic (P < 0·001) and 48·8 % did not consume fruits on a daily basis. Moreover, 39·1 % did not engage in physical activity, and over 35 % spent more than 5 h/d on screens. A significant association between the frequency of training during the pandemic and the reported change in weight was found (P < 0·001). A significantly higher percentage of participants reported physical and emotional exhaustion, irritability and tension either all the time or a large part of the time during the pandemic (P < 0·001). Although a high percentage of participants reported sleeping more hours per night during the pandemic, 63 % had sleep disturbances. The study highlights that the lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic caused a variety of lifestyle changes, physical inactivity and psychological problems among adults in the MENA region.
Journal Article
Digitalization for Sustainable Agri-Food Systems: Potential, Status, and Risks for the MENA Region
Digital technologies offer a potential solution to improve sustainability—economic, social, and environmental—of agri-food systems around the globe. While developed countries have led the innovation and adoption of digital agriculture, the potential impact in developing countries—including in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region—is massive. This article synthesizes existing evidence to review the potential and current contribution of digital technologies to the agri-food sectors in MENA. Digital agriculture shows promise in addressing the key challenges facing the agri-food sector across MENA countries. Improvements in primary production, supply chain and logistics performance, and optimized use of scarce natural resources (notably agricultural water) could be notable, if digital technologies can be implemented as envisioned. Available evidence shows that adoption of digital agriculture is at early stages, generally led by high-value agricultural production targeting domestic markets in Gulf countries and export markets in Mashreq countries. Economic sustainability appears the strongest force for current adoption, with less focus on social or environmental sustainability. Public policies should not only foster the adoption of digital technologies in MENA but also ensure equity of access, transparency of use, data protections, and labor protections. Policymakers should move beyond traditional, production-centric views to deliver also on social and environmental sustainability.
Journal Article
Global epidemiology of hepatitis B and hepatitis C in people who inject drugs: results of systematic reviews
Injecting drug use is an important risk factor for transmission of viral hepatitis, but detailed, transparent estimates of the scale of the issue do not exist. We estimated national, regional, and global prevalence and population size for hepatitis C virus (HCV) and hepatitis B virus (HBV) in injecting drug users (IDUs).
We systematically searched for data for HBV and HCV in IDUs in peer-reviewed databases (Medline, Embase, and PsycINFO), grey literature, conference abstracts, and online resources, and made a widely distributed call for additional data. From 4386 peer-reviewed and 1019 grey literature sources, we reviewed 1125 sources in full. We extracted studies into a customised database and graded them according to their methods. We included serological reports of HCV antibodies (anti-HCV), HBV antibodies (anti-HBc), or HBV surface antigen (HBsAg) in studies of IDUs with more than 40 participants (<100% HIV-positive) and sampling frames that did not exclude participants on the basis of age or sex. With endorsed decision rules, we calculated prevalence estimates with anti-HCV and anti-HBc as proxies for exposure and HBsAg as proxy for current infection. We combined these estimates with IDU population sizes to calculate the number of IDUs with positive HBV or HCV statuses.
We located eligible reports with data for prevalence of anti-HCV in IDUs for 77 countries; midpoint prevalence estimates suggested 60–80% of IDUs had anti-HCV in 25 countries and more than 80% of IDUs did so in 12 countries. About 10.0 million (range 6.0–15.2) IDUs worldwide might be anti-HCV positive. China (1.6 million), USA (1.5 million), and Russia (1.3 million) had the largest such populations. We identified eligible HBsAg reports for 59 countries, with midpoint prevalence estimates of 5–10% in 21 countries and more than 10% in ten countries. Worldwide, we estimate 6.4 million IDUs are anti-HBc positive (2.3–9.7 million), and 1.2 million (0.3–2.7 million) are HBsAg positive.
More IDUs have anti-HCV than HIV infection, and viral hepatitis poses a key challenge to public health. Variation in the coverage and quality of existing research creates uncertainty around estimates. Improved and more complete data and reporting are needed to estimate the scale of the issue, which will inform efforts to prevent and treat HCV and HBV in IDUs.
WHO and US National Institutes of Health (NIDA R01 DA018609).
Journal Article
THE ROLE OF DIGITAL MEDIA
During the 'Arab Spring,' young tech savvy activists led uprisings in a dozen countries across North Africa and the Middle East. At first, digital media allowed democratization movements to develop new tactics for catching dictators off guard. Eventually, authoritarian governments worked social media into their own counter-insurgency strategies. What have we learned about the role of digital media in modern protest? Digital media helped to turn individualized, localized, and community-specific dissent into structured movements with a collective consciousness about both shared grievances and opportunities for action. Adapted from the source document.
Journal Article
Implementation of random forest, adaptive boosting, and gradient boosting decision trees algorithms for gully erosion susceptibility mapping using remote sensing and GIS
Gullying is one of the problems that cause soil degradation in semi-arid areas and should be predicted to mitigate its damaging effects. Three machine learning models have been employed in this work to map the susceptibility to gully erosion in the N'fis river basin in the Moroccan High Atlas. Utilizing high-resolution images from Google Earth alongside fieldwork data, we digitized 434 gully erosion events to construct the comprehensive inventory map. These data were divided into two groups: training (70%) and test (30%). Based on the literature research and the multicollinearity test, 11 conditioning factors were selected. The receiver operating characteristic (ROC) approach and other statistical measures were used to quantify the model's accuracy. The study findings highlight the significance of drainage density, slope, NDVI, and distance from roads as crucial factors influencing gully erosion in the study area. Among the evaluated machine learning algorithms, the random forest (RF) model exhibited the highest performance, with an area under the curve (AUC) value of 0.932. It was followed by adaptive boosting (AB) with an AUC of 0.902 and gradient-boosted decision trees (GBDT) with an AUC of 0.893. The maps produced reveal that the southern and central regions of the study area have the classes of very high and high gully erosion susceptibility. The outputs of the current study can be used by decision-makers to improve prevention planning and mitigation techniques against gully erosion damage.
Journal Article
Global Index of Vegetation-Plot Databases (GIVD): a new resource for vegetation science
Question: How many vegetation plot observations (relevés) are available in electronic databases, how are they geographically distributed, what are their properties and how might they be discovered and located for research and application? Location: Global. Methods: We compiled the Global Index of Vegetation-Plot Databases (GIVD; http://www.givd.info), an Internet resource aimed at registering metadata on existing vegetation databases. For inclusion, databases need to (i) contain temporally and spatially explicit species co-occurrence data and (ii) be accessible to the scientific public. This paper summarizes structure and data quality of databases registered in GIVD as of 30 December 2010. Results: On the given date, 132 databases containing more than 2.4 million non-overlapping plots had been registered in GIVD. The majority of these data were in European databases (83 databases, 1.6 million plots), whereas other continents were represented by substantially less (North America 15, Asia 13, Africa nine, South America seven, Australasia two, multi-continental three). The oldest plot observation was 1864, but most plots were recorded after 1970. Most plots reported vegetation on areas of 1 to 1000 m2; some also stored time-series and nested-plot data. Apart from geographic reference (required for inclusion), most frequent information was on altitude (71%), slope aspect and inclination (58%) and land use (38%), but rarely soil properties (<7%). Conclusions: The vegetation plot data in GIVD constitute a major resource for biodiversity research, both through the large number of species occurrence records and storage of species co-occurrence information at a small scale, combined with structural and plot-based environmental data. We identify shortcomings in available data that need to be addressed through sampling under-represented geographic regions, providing better incentives for data collection and sharing, developing user-friendly database exchange standards, as well as tools to analyse and remove confounding effects of sampling biases. The increased availability of data sets conferred by registration in GIVD offers significant opportunities for large-scale studies in community ecology, macroecology and global change research.
Journal Article