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The study involved 1240 women covering the ten administrative regions of Ghana. The aim was to study the prevalence of maternal mortality and its distribution across the ten regions based on given demographic factors. Three main analytical methods were used: Direct estimation method, Fay-Herriot method and Binary Logistic regression. The study revealed that prevalence of maternal mortality in Ghana was high among women engaged in manual works, rural dwellers, women living without partners and women living in pro-poor families. The Northern region had the highest number of maternal deaths followed by the Western region whilst the Ashanti and the Upper East regions had the lowest number of maternal deaths. There is therefore the need for Ghana Health Service to engage all stakeholders in checking maternal mortality in the country.

Globally, Africa���s food security is the lowest but an in-depth quantitative analysis on its food system is still lacking. To achieve this, food production is used as the indicator for food availability and food price, as the proxy for food access at the continental and regional level respectively. The different dimensions studied focused on the crop production-population (cpp) system and food price correlations/tail dependence. The cpp was found to be stable and the preservation of this stability under a reduced (constant) crop production (population) was verified by the Vasicek model. In contrast, an increase in the population destabilized the system. Given that food insecurity is much more prevalent in East Africa (EA), the extreme quarterly maize prices in Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia were analyzed using rank correlation measures, copulas, univariate and bivariate generalized extreme value theory. For all years (2006-2019), Kenya-Ethiopia exhibited the highest correlation while Somalia-Kenya, the lowest. Across different periods, the global food crises (global stressor) stimulated a higher correlation between price-pairs than the widespread drought (local stressor) in EA. Tail dependence is present but asymptotic dependence is absent for all pairs., International Journal on Food System Dynamics, Vol 13, No 1 (2022)

Maternal mortality is a critical measure for quality of health system in any country and hence many countries have made concerted efforts to check its occurrence. Various stakeholders involved in the management of health system in Ghana have been tasked to ensure women do not die whilst giving birth. This study was conducted on a sample of 1,052 women selected from all the ten administrative regions of Ghana in which 188 maternal deaths occurred. Two main analytical tools, namely the Zero-Inflated Negative Binomial Regression and Bayesian Additive Posterior Modeling using IN LA were used. Age at death, Marital Status, and Place of Death emerged as the most significant determinants of maternal mortality in Ghana. It was realized that high number of maternal deaths were recorded in the least developed regions with Northern Region having the highest number of Maternal Deaths. It is therefore important for stakeholders to devise a road map of getting health workers to accept postings to the rural areas and also provide well resourced health facilities to stem this menace.