Ghanaian part of the 5-member team to win first place in the UK final of the CFA Institute Research Challenge

Five MSc students of Sterling University (including a Ghanaian) have been awarded first place in the UK final of the CFA Institute Research Challenge. Great work, team!

Ghanaian student wins top award at the DStv Eutelsat Star Awards

Ghanaian student, Ayawen Asuinura, won the top award at the DStv Eutelsat Star Awards, held in Nairobi, Kenya.

The DStv Eutelsat Star Awards seek to celebrate rising students interested in science and technology on the African continent.

Organised by MultiChoice and Eutelsat, the fifth edition of the DStv Eutelsat Star Awards reached a record participation with nearly 2,000 entries from 18 countries.

In the end of the context, Ayawen Asuinura was adjudged as the winner in the essay category.

The awards means Ayawen Asuinura has won a trip to Paris and onwards to a launch site to witness a rocket blast into space to place a satellite into orbit.

This is the first win in the essay category for Ghana that has already produced two winners in the poster category.

The runner-up in the essay category was Sara Eribo from Equatorial Guinea who won a trip for two to visit MultiChoice facilities and the South African National Space Agency near Johannesburg.

In the essay category, students were asked to interpret the quote by Socrates “Man must rise above the Earth, to the top of the atmosphere and beyond, for only thus will he fully understand the world in which he lives” and to show how satellites help understand and take care of our planet.

In the poster category, Mallon Marume from Zimbabwe scooped the first prize for artistic creativity and will visit Eutelsat in Paris to understand how satellites are operated and piloted in space and the many ways they benefit users.

This is a consecutive win for Zimbabwe as Joseph Mahiya won top honours in the essay category last year.

Benjamin Ibanda from Uganda was the runner-up in the same category.

The four winning schools attended by the overall award winners and runners-up were also rewarded with a DStv installation including dish, TV set, PVR decoder and free access to the DStv Education Bouquet.

Speaking on the entries, European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut, Paolo Nespoli, said: “As the Jury Chairman of the DStv Eutelsat Star Awards over the last three years, I confirm that this year’s entries re-affirm the high standard of this unique competition.

The quality and creativity of the finalists’ essays and artwork underscore the deep interest of Africa’s young generation in science and technology”.

He added “I am truly honoured to be part of a competition that reveals some of Africa’s future thought leaders”.

Ghanaian UW Ph.D. student awarded for creation of index-based insurance for farmers

Adolph Okine from Ghana

A first year Ph.D. student at University of Wisconsin School of Business, received the Best Paper Award from the Journal of Insurance Issues and for his creation of an index-based insurance formula to provide stability to farmers in developing countries.

Adolph Okine’s formula provides a way to insure farmers whose farms face unpredictable weather patterns.

Originally from Ghana, Okine earned his Bachelor’s degree in actuarial science at University of Cape Coast. He then completed his masters at Illinois State University before joining UW’s Ph.D. program.

According to Okine’s paper, in places like Ghana, where agricultural farming accounts for 36 percent of the country’s gross domestic product, weather related factors like rainfall can cause damage to crops, causing production loss.

Despite the importance of agriculture Okine’s home country and other African countries, he said there are few options for farmers to insure and protect their investments.

While studying actuarial science in the masters program at Illinois State, Okine developed the basis for his formula, which would help farmers in developing countries similar to his homeland. The formula would insure farmers’ crops so they are correctly paid for the crops lost.

Index-based insurance is an alternative form of insurance for agricultural farming. It compensates farmers for production losses due to a trigger or an event. Events can include weather patterns like heavy rain, Okine explained.

“I realized that some things were kind of triggers, and among those kinds of triggers in the payments made by insurance businesses were very important,” Okine said.

These “triggers,” Okine said, can minimize the basis risks. For index-based insurance, basis risk reflects the difference between the realized index’s expected loss and the actual crop loss.

But the insured index does not exactly correlate with individual farm yields. Because of this, insurers of index-based insurance can be exposed to this basis risk, Okine said.

For example, Okine explained that it is possible for those insured for temperature-based or rainfall-based insurance policies to experience production loss. But while the insured suffered a loss, they are not eligible to receive a payment because there has been no occurrences of trigger for temperature changes or rainfall shortage.

Similarly, he said it is possible for an insured farmer to receive a payment when they did not experience a production loss. Using an effective weather induced crop yield model is crucial in creating weather-based index insurance that is satisfactory for the insured and the insurer, Okine said

To create this effective weather induced crop yield model, Okine said his team needed to find the optimal trigger. The optimal trigger would allow index-based insurance businesses to better price for production losses.

The clustering analysis is a data driven method that helped determine the optimal trigger in rainfall for drought identification, according to UW statement.

Okine’s team segmented the rainfall into two parts, allowing them to discover a unique threshold for rainfall that correlated with crop yields.

“I’m proud to have worked on this project because it has the potential to help countries like Ghana, who depend on agriculture,” Okine said.