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Sanitation change continues to be on the forefront of the global development agenda, even as it is becoming clear that the targets established in the Sustainable Development Goals will not be met. But since improving access to safely managed sanitation facilities remains a cost-effective and impactful measure to improve people's lives, it is still important to assess currently implemented policies to be able to learn from best practices and to understand how different approaches work under different contexts. This paper provides comparative analysis of country-level policies in India and Ethiopia, two countries that achieved notable progress in eliminating open defecation through distinct sanitation strategies, with the aim of confronting the advantages and disadvantages of both approaches. While in India the primary emphasis has been on the supply-side, i.e., provision of subsidized sanitation infrastructure, Ethiopian strategy prioritized the demand-side by addressing change in sanitation behavior through Community Total Led Sanitation. The analysis shows that neither of the strategies can fully achieve the sanitation change and a combination of both seems to be the most impactful approach in combating open defecation. It also argues that policymakers must consider not only local socioeconomic and budgetary constraints but also historical, institutional, sociocultural, and geographical specifics in deciding what type of subsidies would be the most fitting. At the same time, they also need to address the appropriate social norms to achieve the desirable change in sanitation behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the effect of rural transport on smallholder farmers' purchased input use. A random sample of 500 respondents was selected and relevant data was collected. Descriptive, correlation, and regression statistics were used to analyze the data. The multiple linear regression analysis revealed that farmers' purchased input use was found to be significantly and negatively related to distance to major market, distance to all weather road, distance to farm plot, transport cost, and size of land holding. In contrast, farmers' purchased input use was found to be significantly and positively related to family size, off farm income, membership in a cooperative, being in Horro district, having animal cart, and access to good road. Further, the results of hierarchical multiple regression showed that approximately 82% of the total variation in purchased input use can be explained by the linear combination of all independent variables. Furthermore, the result showed that rural transport infrastructure-related variables, as a set, contributed 13.3% to the prediction of farmers' purchased input use over and above the remaining predictors. The results suggest that improving the rural road infrastructure and access to rural transportation services is vital in encouraging farmers' purchased input use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper deals with the functions that automatically extract lineaments from the 90 m Shuttle Radar Topographic Mission (SRTM) of Digital Elevation Model (DEM) (Consortium for Spatial Information 2014) in the software ArcGIS 10.1 and PCI Geomatica. They were performed for the Main Ethiopian Rift and the Ethiopian Highlands (transregional scale 1,060,000 km2), which are one of the tectonically most active areas in the world. The values of input parameters - the RADI (filter radius) value, GTHR (edge gradient threshold), LTHR (curve length), FTHR (line fitting error), ATHR (angular difference), and the DTHR (linked distance threshold) - and their influence on the final shape and number of lineaments are discussed. A map of automated extracted lineaments was created and compared with 1) the tectonic faults on the geological map by Geological Survey of Ethiopia (Mangesha et al. 1996) and 2) the lineaments based on visual interpretation by the author from the same data set. The predominant azimuth of lineaments is similar to the azimuth of the faults on the geological map. The comparison of lineaments by automated visualization in GIS and visual interpretation of lineaments carried out by the authors around the Jemma River Basin (regional scale 16,000 km2) proved that both sets of lineaments are of the same NE-SW azimuth, which is the orientation of the rift. However, lineaments mapping by automated visualization in GIS identifies a larger number of shorter lineaments than lineaments created by visual interpretation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]