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Whereas the influence of engagement on learning outcomes has been extensively investigated, this has not been studied for undergraduate students of sports science major field. The objective of this study was to measure the extent of student engagement and learning outcomes and further examine their relationships in the context of a sports science program in the Ethiopian public higher education system.

The study used a cross-sectional survey design collecting quantitative data from a random sample (n=83) of volunteered undergraduate sports science students from four public universities in Ethiopia. The student engagement theories were used as guiding frameworks.

Findings reveal above-average levels of engagement and learning outcome scores and low to moderate relations between the scores of engagement and outcomes measured. Both independently and interdependently, the student engagement factors reveal statistically significant relationships with all the measured outcomes, adjusted R² ranging between 17 and 50 percent (p < 0.001).

Because of disciplinary focus on sports science and small sample size, generalization is limited in scope.

Higher education teachers and administrators who work with undergraduates of sports science major should take into consideration the contexts and the relevance of student engagement for greater learning outcomes, especially student-teacher relationships. Hence, mandating instructional interventions to promote engagement through authentic faculty development and increasing academic rigor should be serious concerns.

Undergraduate students of sports science major field have received little attention in the higher education research literature, and discipline-based education research is a growing field of inquiry. This study addresses this gap.

This paper aims to assess Food Variety Score (FVS), Dietary Diversity Score (DDS) and dietary quality of collected complementary foods consumed in Jimma town, southwest Ethiopia.

Multi-stage stratified simple random sampling method was used to identify 384 children who were between 6 to 24 months of age living in Jimma town, Ethiopia. FVS and DDS were assessed based on 24 h recall method. Aliquot of infant’s diet samples were collected from randomly selected 30 household mothers feeding to 6-24 months aged children, and they are combined to get 15 samples by enquiring the ingredients similarly used in preparation. The major nutrients, anti-nutrients were determined with standard procedures. Further, nutrient adequacy and mean adequacy were determined for collected samples.

Results showed that mean FVS was 7.14 ± 4.07 (range 0 to 18) and DDS was 3.44 ± 1.75 (range 1 to 8). Consumption of diversified diet among the studied population significantly associated with residence areas of children’s (p = 0.001), age of the care taker (p = 0.001), occupation of care takers (p = 0.001), monthly income (p = 0.001), average money spent on food purchase per month (p = 0.001). Average mean adequacy of macronutrients (crude protein, crude fat and carbohydrate) was observed as 0.81, micronutrient (Fe, Ca, Zn) mean adequacy was 0.49 and Vitamin A adequacy was 0.34 for the complementary foods. All the complementary foods were reported mean adequacy of < 1 for macro and micro nutrients.

Studies on dietary diversity and dietary quality of the complementary foods were not documented in Jimma town, Ethiopia. The results of this study are highly useful to understand the complementary foods consumption pattern particularly in dietary diversity and food variety. Moreover, results obtained on dietary quality are very useful to recommend further development in complementary food preparations in the study area.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the theoretical and empirical possibility of measuring trust and commitment in collective actions.

The study employs choice experiments to estimate trust implicitly as opposed to the common practice of measuring trust explicitly. Several experiments were conducted to assess members’ level of trust and commitment to marketing cooperatives in rural Ethiopia.

The results of the study indicate that significant number of farmers do not yet have trust in their organization and fellow members in both absolute and relative terms. The probability of trust increases when members actively participate in cooperative governance, are less diverse, stay longer in the cooperative, and when cooperatives are older. The authors also learnt that both trust and commitment have indeed improved the performance of farmers’ market organizations. Trust in cooperative is asymmetrically sensitive to incentives and disincentives.

The study implied that research efforts attempting to estimate trust in collective action shall use an implicit measurement and consider the sensitivity of trust to relativeness, incentives and types of transactions.

The findings of this study showed that rural organizations that are established with external help, such as agricultural cooperatives in Africa, seem to struggle to earn the trust of their current and potential members. This implies that given the effectiveness and persistence of informal rural organizations emerged through mutual trust, cooperatives must be organized either through informal ways as trust-based organizations or based on cooperative business principles of voluntarism and independence.

This paper employs the behaviorally appealing choice experiment approach to capture the different aspects of trust such as relativism, sensitivity of trust to incentive and types of transactions in smallholder producers’ organizations.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the patterns and trends of drought incidence in north east highlands of Ethiopia using monthly rainfall record for the period 1984-2014.

Standard precipitation index and Mann – Kendal test were used to analyze drought incident and trends of drought occurrences, respectively. The spatial extent of droughts in the study area has been interpolated by inverse distance weighted method using the spatial analyst tool of ArcGIS.

Most of the studied stations experienced drought episodes in 1984, 1987/1988, 1992/1993, 1999, 2003/2004 and 2007/2008 which were among the worst drought years in the history of Ethiopia. The year 1984 was the most drastic and distinct-wide extreme drought episode in all studied stations. The Mann–Kendal test shows an increasing tendencies of drought at three-month (spring) timescale at all stations though significant (p < 0.05) only at Mekaneselam and decreasing tendencies at three-month (summer) and 12-month timescales at all stations. The frequency of total drought was the highest in central and north parts of the region in all study seasons.

This detail drought characterization can be used as bench mark to take comprehensive drought management measures such as early warning system, preparation and contingency planning, climate change adaptation programs.

Ethiopia suffers from structural food insecurity due to its low food production, low purchasing power, and climatic shocks such as drought. Coffee is Ethiopia's primary source of foreign earnings, and 95% of it is produced by smallholder farmers. Coffee also provide better income to smallholder farmers than other crops. However, it is unclear how much smallholder coffee producers participate in cash savings and if their savings help them attain food security. In this study, the authors aim to assess the impact of cash savings on the food security of smallholder coffee farmers in Ethiopia.

Using cross-sectional quantitative data from 336 randomly selected households and qualitative data from the local community, this study examines the impact of cash savings on household food security. Logistic regression and propensity score matching models were used to analyze the impact of cash savings on households' food security.

About, 43.5% of coffee farmers did not participate in cash savings during the study period, while 50.6% had no access to credit. The major factors that limit households' likelihood of participating in cash saving were the gender of household head and family size. Approximately, 38.4 and 27.1% of coffee farmers were food poor based on calorie intake and consumption scores, respectively. Households' participation in saving increases their ability to meet dietary energy requirements and consume diverse foods.

To the knowledge of the author, empirical studies that examined the impact of cash saving on the food security status of smallholder farmers in the study area are limited. Therefore, this study brings original contribution and fills research gap on coffee farmers' cash saving and food security; that received little attention from previous researchers in Ethiopia.

The purpose of this study was to examine adverse outcomes associated with cesarean deliveries and to assess potential confounding factors.

A hospital-based cross-sectional study was conducted from September 1−30, 2019 using mixed methods of data collection. Multistage sampling was used to draw the eligible study participants. The sample size was calculated using the single population proportion formula. A systematic random sampling technique was used to draw the sample size. 180 original medical records were excluded because of having missed information, leaving 1,618 women as the study population. We used the questionnaire adapted from the Ethiopian Demographic and Health Survey to collect quantitative data and analyzed using SPSS version 22, while thematic analysis for qualitative measures was used to generate themes regarding associated perspectives of participants from a community.

More than 383 women delivered by cesarean section. 20% of the mothers with the mean age at birth of 26.1 ± 4.8 experienced adverse outcomes. Adjusted odds ratio (AOR) was used to measure the association of determinants and was 2.95 (95% CI 1.19–7.29) for nonuse of antenatal care, 3.18 (95% CI 1.43–6.94) for nonuse of prophylaxis, 4.28 (95% CI 1.58−11.61) for history of medical illness and 7.09 (95% CI 1.19−45.59) for use of substandard operation set up compared with their counterparts.

Strengths of the study include the finding of the study are reliably reported in mixed study methods examining hospital-based institutional and personal risk factors and exploring the whole community's perspectives. However, the important limitations of the study indicate that the study poses a number of challenges related to studying design, therefore there was not sufficient evidence of causality to draw conclusions from the findings. In addition, the study was conducted at a single hospital so that it is not convenient to generalize the findings of the study for setting different in social and economic status.

Based on the findings, attention has been drawn to healthcare personnel to provide training and consultation services for pregnant women and for health care administration to ensure standard set up for operation.